Those whom the Gods choose to bury in irony, they first make ridiculous.
h/t johnlee
Those whom the Gods choose to bury in irony, they first make ridiculous.
h/t johnlee
If radical environmentalism is refighting WWII: Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.
The primary difference is that 85 million dead aren’t enough to produce the results they seek.
Math is hard.
Families in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Saskatchewan understand we need to do more to protect our environment and the health of our kids and grandkids. Starting next year, with the Climate Action Incentive, families in these provinces will get more money than they pay. pic.twitter.com/RIa80zbTZQ— Catherine McKenna 🇨🇦 (@cathmckenna) December 31, 2018
Lying? That’s easy.
If global warming is truly the urgent, existential crisis The Times’ editorial board makes it out to be, it should be willing to condemn the use of private jets, right? No one really needs a private jet, and flying commercial usually comes with a much lower carbon footprint.
A car made from waste plastic has been forced to abort its mission to the South Pole because of bad weather.
Solar Voyager was set to be the first solar-powered expedition to reach the world’s most southernmost point.
But despite it being Antarctica’s summer, unexpected heavy snow has meant progress has been slow, and now the team have had to turn around.
Now, the protesting Parisians aren’t conservatives in the American sense – lots of their demands have a lefty vibe. But what they do share with us is how the abuse les deplorables have suffered mirrors the abuse America’s increasingly militant Normals have put up with. The French elite has kept dumping on them for decades, impoverishing them through economic mismanagement, cronyism, and corruption, changing their culture without bothering to ask permission through unlimited Third World immigration, and taxing them to increase elite wealth while stripping them of a say in their own government.
Sound familiar?
Macron has promised to come out of hiding sometime today.
Update: Macron promises to give out other peoples’ money.
French President Emmanuel Macron has scrapped a fuel tax rise amid fears of new violence, after weeks of nationwide protests and the worst rioting in Paris in decades.
An official with the Elysee palace told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the president decided to get rid of the tax.
Philippe told lawmakers that “the tax is now abandoned” in the 2019 budget, and the government is “ready for dialogue.” The budget can be adjusted or renegotiated through the course of the year.
Three weeks of protests have left four people dead and were a massive challenge to Macron.
Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.
Be disheartened. It’s better than disheaded.
With his popularity rating at record lows (recent polls put it at around 26%, on par with Hollande), his capital city burning and the populists he defeated during his stunning electoral victory last year making serious electoral inroads, French President Emmanuel Macron finally caved, and on Tuesday ordered a six month suspension of planned ‘fuel taxes’ which spurred widespread and destructive protests across France over the past three weeks.
After reportedly weighing declaring a state of emergency that would have cleared the way for an unprecedented crackdown on dissent, Macron decided that such measures would only intensify the popular opposition to his government. And according to Reuters, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has declared a suspension of the staggeringly unpopular tax.
h/t Robert of Ottawa
Puzzled by this reporting, I did a rough calculation in my initial reporting on the NCA4. Today’s $20 trillion GDP, growing at a 3 percent rate, would rise to $226 trillion by 2100. With climate change, it would instead rise to only $203 trillion. Americans living at the end of this century would be about 10 times richer on average than we are now, albeit in a much warmer world.
This morning on @WendyMesleyCBC I posed @cathmckenna a question regarding #CarbonTax and #CdnAg I received a very out of touch answer so here is my question again in full and my response to her answer. pic.twitter.com/STUev4HiF9
— Dirt Sweat N Tears (@farmermegzz) December 2, 2018
https://twitter.com/KTHopkins/status/1069308643038896133
It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government’s decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation’s drivers and motorcycle riders.
In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left …/…
…/… What has been most irksome for les Français since the turn of the century has been the ubiquitous radars, which, like red-light cameras in the United States, are accused of having (far) more to do with bringing revenue to the state than with road safety.
And just like the arms industry in the Soviet Union, if there was one area of France where the technology was always moving forward, it was the radar business.
Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. …/… What has happened since shows the Deep State at work in Europe just as much as, if not more than, in North America — and this leftist statism is the kind of news that has been ignored by the mainstream media, in France itself as much as abroad. …/…
Protesters descended on the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, the heart of EU decision-making, as they created Belgium’s own ‘yellow jacket’ campaign against rising fuel prices and the cost of living. The EU Commission was forced to temporarily shut its doors as the building’s security guards refused to let anyone in or out while protesters marched passed. […]
At least two police vans were destroyed in what started as a peaceful but unauthorised demonstration descended into violence.
An eclectic mix of energy and climate news stories from around the world compiled by Roger Andrews.
This week’s lead story features the growing number of cracks in Scotland’s Hunterston reactor, which according to some requires an immediate shutdown to avoid a second Chernobyl. Then on to our usual mix of energy and energy-related stories: Low oil prices to mandate an OPEC production cut; the Turk Stream gas pipeline: coal in Germany, Hungary, Japan and China; nuclear in Poland, France, Spain and the EU; renewables in Australia and Puerto Rico; batteries in California; tidal power in France; Solheim quits; hydrogen; foldable capacitors for energy storage and how Houston’s high-rises halted Hurricane Harvey.
Note that there is some informed commentary on the gravity of the Huntertson situation. If you don’t hear from me again it will be because I’ve been vaporised 🙁
The fossil-defueling of the planet has been postponed indefinitely;
The Kobe project is one of more than 30 new power stations being planned or built by Japan that burn coal — the dirtiest and most polluting fossil fuel and one which is being phased out by some 30 governments around the world. [..]
Japanese government officials justify their reliance on coal by citing cost, security of supply concerns and the need for a diverse energy mix. Coal power plants are “necessary” because “the resource is cheap and more economical with scale,” Shogo Tanaka, director of the Energy Strategy Office at METI, told the Nikkei Asian Review.
They’re acting as though they want the lights to stay on.
David Wallace-Wells has written a new piece of “Climate Disaster Porn” : UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.
This isn’t the first time.
One of the comments to his newest piece is priceless:
I love the certainty with which the author makes these pronouncements. There “will” be a tipping point. Killer heat waves “will” kill millions. Rising seas “will” swallow cities. You guys have been making these scary predictions for 30 years, with zero results. Why should we believe you now?
“Um, because now we really, really, really–better add a couple more–really, really mean it. Don’t make us BREAK OUT THE ALL CAPS!”
Atmospheric CO2 is a minor, very minor, player in the overall climate. It’s modest effect as a greenhouse gas, a fraction of water vapor, diminishes rapidly with increasing concentration. The current 400 ppm provides a very, very slight increase in warming over the Pleistocene average of 280 ppm, which is extremely low by long-term averages anyway. Furthermore, the human contribution of CO2 is less than 5 percent of the total.
Yes, the climate was warmed by a degree or so over the last 150 years or so. So what? Be thankful. One hundred fifty years ago, the planet was still recovering from the effects of the Little Ice Age, the coldest period in about 10,000 years. Since that time we have rebounded to the Holocene average and a trifle extra. Big. Freaking. Deal.
A draft internal UN audit leaked to the Guardian in September found Solheim had spent almost $500,000 (£390,000) on air travel and hotels in just 22 months, and was away 80% of the time. The audit said this was a “reputation risk” for an organisation dedicated to fighting climate change.
h/t Steve from Rockwood
Thanksgiving Day 2018 may be among coldest on record in northeastern US.
Did you noticed it snowed in Houston?
There are too many polar bears in parts of Nunavut and climate change hasn’t yet affected any of them, says a draft management plan from the territorial government that contradicts much of conventional scientific thinking.
The proposed plan — which is to go to public hearings in Iqaluit on Tuesday — says that growing bear numbers are increasingly jeopardizing public safety and it’s time Inuit knowledge drove management policy.
“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,” says the document, the result of four years of study and public consultation.