Good News: Asheville Spent Millions On Electric Buses: Most No Longer Operate

By William Teach January 24, 2024 – 7:15 am

Electric buses cost 3 to 4 times what a regular diesel bus costs, but, we’ve been Reliably Told that they will save around $100K over the lifespan of the EBs. They have to run first

From the link

The city of Asheville, North Carolina, shelled out millions of dollars in 2018 to add five electric buses to its fleet. Now, three of the five sit idle, and city employees are telling the cautionary tale.

Asheville’s interim transportation director, Jessica Morriss, told local station WLOS-TV that the three out-of-commission buses are down due to a combination of software issues and mechanical problems, and one has had a broken door since July that can’t be replaced.

“We haven’t been able to get new doors,” Morriss told the outlet. “There’s no third party that makes a door. We’d have to get custom-made doors.”

Part of the issue is that the company that made the electric buses, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy in August. According to the News & Observer, Proterra’s operations are still shut down. The company was recently purchased by Phoenix Motor, but it is unclear when parts and services for Proterra buses will be available.

They can’t get a door. A door. Regular buses are fixed easy peasy, and you don’t have to deal with software problems.

In the meantime, Asheville is staring down losses from a major investment. Morriss told WLOS that each bus cost at least $616,000, and the city had to spend another $200,000 for the installation of each charger, another $118,000 every year to lease batteries for the buses, and nearly $45,500 annually in electric costs to charge them.

Wait, leasing batteries? Along with the cost of the buses, which are three times the average cost of a commuter bus.

She also noted that maintenance costs for the electric buses have topped $250,000. At the same time, having most of the electric buses out of operation has increased wear and tear on the rest of the 32 buses in the fleet, which either run on biodiesel or are hybrid models.

Yeah, maybe they should have just bought good old reliable diesel buses

Maintenance director John McDaniel also weighed in on the problems Asheville has had with its electric buses. He told WLOS that the two electric buses that are still in operation can only travel around 78 miles in the wintertime before needing to return to the shop and charge for hours.

What a fantastic investment.

Read: Good News: Asheville Spent Millions On Electric Buses: Most No Longer Operate »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 11 Comments | Trackback URL

Hamas Declines 2 Month Ceasefire In Exchange For Hostages

By William Teach January 24, 2024 – 7:00 am

Hamas and liberals: “We want a ceasefire!”

Israel: “Sure, we’ll give you 2 months, just release the hostages”

US State Dept designated terrorist organization Hamas: “No.”

Hamas said to reject Israeli offer of two-month pause in war for release of hostages

Hamas has rejected Israel’s proposal for a two-month ceasefire during which the terror group would release Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners, said a senior Egyptian official on Tuesday, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The official said that Hamas leaders have also refused to leave Gaza and are demanding that Israel fully withdraw from the territory and allow Palestinians to return to their homes.

Israel did not confirm the report. Channel 12 news quoted unnamed Israeli officials saying on Tuesday evening that Israel has not been informed of Hamas rejecting the offer. (snip)

The Axios news site reported on Monday that Israel had submitted a proposal through Qatari and Egyptian mediators that would see it agree to pause its military offensive in exchange for a phased release of the remaining 136 hostages in Gaza.

The proposal does not heed Hamas’s demand for Israel to end the war completely, but does appear to go further than Israel has gone in previous offers, two Israeli officials were cited as saying.

The leaders of Hamas, who make sure they are nowhere near any fighting, do not want the war to end. They do not care how many Palestinians are killed. They want Israel to be demonized as the Bad Guy.

The offer is relatively similar to ones that have reportedly been proffered since a seven-day truce ended nearly two months ago. Hamas has insisted that it will not agree to release any hostages unless the fighting in Gaza ceases for good — a nonstarter for Israel, as it would leave those who orchestrated the October 7 massacre in power, and with parts of the Hamas war machine intact.

These are the people Democrats back. Terrorists.

Read: Hamas Declines 2 Month Ceasefire In Exchange For Hostages »

Posted in Israel, RoP | 9 Comments | Trackback URL

Is Nikki Haley Going Climate Cult?

By William Teach January 23, 2024 – 3:00 pm

I’d love for her to answer the question “do you believe the current warm period is mostly/solely caused by humanity, and, if so, what do you propose to do about it?”

Republican Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley Says Climate Change is Real. Is She Proposing Anything to Stop It?

climate cowIn her recent memoir, presidential candidate Nikki Haley recounted a telling anecdote about her role in pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 when she served as the nation’s United Nations ambassador.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pleaded with her not to do it, she said. Prior to joining the Trump Administration, Tillerson was the chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest non-government owned oil and gas company, and had spent his career overseeing the extraction of the very fossil fuels that made a global climate agreement necessary. He argued that the U.S. needed to stay in the Paris agreement as part of a larger effort to save the country from Trump’s worst instincts.

Haley wouldn’t have it. In With All Due Respect, a book she published in 2019, she writes that Tillerson and other cabinet members who opposed the President’s policies were “dangerous” and “disloyal.”

But, now

Fast forward five years: Haley is now running against her former boss in the Republican presidential primary. Unlike Trump, who maintains that climate change is a “hoax,” Haley says global warming is real and needs to be addressed.

She positions herself as a moderate alternative to frontrunner Trump and the “chaos” that follows him. The American Conservation Coalition Action, a conservative environmental organization, gives the former ambassador its highest ranking among Republican presidential candidates for efforts to address climate change.

However, beyond acknowledging the reality of climate change, there is little daylight between Haley and Trump on climate policy.

Earlier this fall, Haley denigrated the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in reducing carbon emissions in U.S. history, as a “communist manifesto” of “green energy handouts” that she would repeal if elected.

Now, you can Believe in anthropogenic climate change without advocating for the Big Government authoritarian, big taxation policies of the climate cult, but, few do. Since her Nikki for POTUS website has nothing (nor any policies for anything), I had to go to the Washington Post

1. Causes of climate change
Do you believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels? If not, is there a different cause you would cite?

Yes. “Is climate change real? Yes, it is,” Haley said during the first GOP presidential primary debate in August 2023. In a 2020 video released by her advocacy group Stand for America, Haley also declared that “man-made climate change is real, but liberal ideas would cost trillions and destroy our economy.”

She’s said, briefly, that Bad Weather is caused by you driving a fossil fueled vehicle. But

3. How to address climate change
Should climate change be addressed through government action or market forces?

Market forces. In 2017, during her time as U.N. ambassador, Haley helped orchestrate President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, which seeks to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Haley has also supported efforts by the private sector to develop and deploy carbon capture technologies. “The private sector produces innovative ideas that actually work, like capturing CO2 before it goes into our air [and] reforestation — a.k.a. planting more trees and forests to soak up CO2,” she said in the 2020 video released by Stand for America, her advocacy group.

The problem here is that she might believe in market forces, but, her Belief in ACC would mean she would let federal agencies run wild with their Nanny State policies and sign legislation that enables more Big Government.

So, yeah, she’s squishy, and concerns me. I’m not a single issue voter, and she’s still be better than any Democrat, but, garbage like this could push me towards Trump. Unfortunately.

Read: Is Nikki Haley Going Climate Cult? »

Posted in Global Warming | 11 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach January 23, 2024 – 1:00 pm

…are trees losing their leaves and getting thing from carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is This ain’t Hell…, with a post on video contradicting key cop testimony on the Oath Keepers.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 5 Comments | Trackback URL

Teachers Push NEA To Abandon Biden Over Supporting Israel Over Hamas

By William Teach January 23, 2024 – 10:30 am

I’m surprised it took this long since teachers have been instrumental over pushing Islamist propaganda and hating on Jews and Israel. Probably not as bad as in colleges, more subtle

These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gaza

When Israel escalated its military operations against Gaza in October, Rahaf Othman was so distraught, she said, she “couldn’t think straight.” The 45-year-old Palestinian American, who teaches social studies at Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Ill., recalled that she “started getting nightmares from my own experiences when I was in Palestine. I was functional at work, but barely functional. My brain was mush. I was getting traumatized every time I turned on my phone.”

Excuse me, “escalated”? Like, they simply decided to attack Gaza for no reason?

“For the first month, people were asking me what we should do, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus.” While in this state, she said she discovered that she could lean on some of her colleagues. “Educators rallied together and created this group, Educators for Palestine. I am grateful they brought me along for the ride.”

Asking a person of a group which no other Arab nation will take in what to do is like asking a meth user if you should give up drugs. Doesn’t say much about a teacher if they cannot think, but, hey, social studies is a good way to gently indoctrinate kids into hating Jews.

Othman is a member of the Illinois Education Association (IEA) Local 218, which covers an area to the south of Chicago, part of the 3 million–strong National Education Association (NEA), the largest labor union in the United States. She is now part of a member effort to press the NEA to put real muscle behind supporting a cease-fire, one prong in a small-but-growing campaign within the US labor movement.

But the rank-and-file campaign goes beyond demanding an end to Israel’s military operations, which have killed at least 22,000 Palestinians, 12,000 of them children. Othman and other members want the NEA to revoke its endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2024 presidential race until the president secures a “permanent cease-fire,” stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” and commits “to a fair due process for asylum-seekers and refugees.”

In other words, back the US State Dept. designated terrorist group Hamas and allow huge numbers of Palestinians who support Hamas into the U.S.

The demand is eye-catching, because Biden appeared to really want the NEA’s endorsement: The president addressed the union by video at its last representative assembly in July 2023. And first lady Jill Biden has made her long-term membership in NEA a key part of her public political identity. “You—all of you—make me proud to be a longtime member of the NEA,” Jill Biden said in an August 2023 address to educators.

Oh, please, he addressed them because they always support the Democrat and always give lots of money. When it comes to actually voting, they’ll turn out for Biden regardless.

For members of the NEA who are desperate to stop the killing of civilians in Gaza, making this support contingent on the Biden administration’s meaningful push for a cease-fire is the best leverage they have. The goal, they say, is not to help former president Donald Trump win but the opposite. “Getting President Biden to change his position on Israel will help him to beat Trump,” reads an explanatory document, circulated with the petition. “People who vote Democratic are overwhelmingly in support of a permanent ceasefire and disapprove of Biden’s handling of the situation.” Polling shows the majority of Americans want a cease-fire, including more than 70 percent of Democrats.

So, they’re overwhelmingly in support of a terrorist organization and all the Palestinians (which would be the majority) who support them and/or hate Jews and Israel? Who, in all cases, support the end of Israel as a nation?

It is a very long piece which subtly hates on Israel and Jews, making them seem to be the bad guys, but, this isn’t the first time. Back in 2021 the NEA, as pushed by Rahf Othman and others, were pushing for anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian measures to be a part of the NEA’s agenda. And the teachers, being good little leftists, will take the side of the Palestinians, a group no Arab nation will take in because of their Islamist leanings.

Meanwhile, here’s CBS being shady

Read: Teachers Push NEA To Abandon Biden Over Supporting Israel Over Hamas »

Posted in Democrats, Israel, RoP | 19 Comments | Trackback URL

Climahysterics Predict One Foot Of Sea Rise For NYC In Next Decade

By William Teach January 23, 2024 – 7:00 am

It’s pretty wild

(Salon) While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”

Oh, wait, wasn’t NYC’s West Side supposed to be under water already? Well, since that failed, let’s do another one

New York City sea levels could rise a foot in next decade

New York City sea levels could rise more than a foot by the 2030s, according to projections presented by a city climate panel.

The nation’s largest city will see as much as 10 percent more precipitation and temperature increases of 2 degrees to 4.7 degrees, the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) said at a presentation at the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast. The presentation’s contents were first reported by The City.

Further into the century, “we can’t rule out” precipitation increases as high as 30 percent, said NPCC member Radley Horton, a climate professor at Columbia University, although he added that projecting precise precipitation increases “is not a strength of climate models.”

Already, “coastal New York City is experiencing a slightly higher rate of sea level rise than the global average,” Horton added, and “sea level rise, even if it doesn’t sound like much … matters an enormous amount. If you raise that baseline by a foot … the high water levels that you might see during the occasional storm, if we add a foot of water to that, we suddenly have the events that used to be very rare happening many times more than they used to,” such as high-tide flooding.

Notice that they use the squishy “could.” Will it or won’t it, guys? Let’s look at actual measurements

.95 feet per 100 years. Which is over average for the last 8,000 years (6-8 inches per century), which would encompass cool periods where you have low to negative sea rise. So, actual measurements, which do not show one foot in 100 years, will not happen in the next 10. Kings Point, which is just to the east of NYC at the most western edge of Long Island sound shows .85 feet per 100 years.

Read: Climahysterics Predict One Foot Of Sea Rise For NYC In Next Decade »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

Mom Of Daughter Murdered By MS-13 Members Sues DHS

By William Teach January 23, 2024 – 6:45 am

I haven’t seen anything that says that the suit includes President Brandon

Mom whose daughter was allegedly killed by migrant MS-13 member sues DHS for $100M

A heartbroken mother whose daughter was allegedly raped and murdered by a teenage MS-13 gang member from El Salvador has filed a lawsuit against the federal government for playing “Russian roulette with our lives,” accusing agents of failing to stop the suspect at the border.

Tammy Nobles, the mother of 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton, who was autistic, argues in her $100 million lawsuit that both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services failed her daughter by allowing the unidentified migrant into the country without confirming his identity.

Nobles and another grieving mother testified on Thursday in front of the House panel conducting an impeachment inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom they accuse of not enforcing federal immigration laws.

“For me, this not a political issue, this a safety issue for everyone living in the United States,” she told the House Homeland Security Committee.

Ultimately, who is responsible for the policies of a mostly open border, of not properly vetting those who are coming across the border, especially the ones that were caught? Joe Biden is.

“Nobody at the border did their job and checked his background,” Nobles reportedly said.

If the feds had properly screened the suspect, even just by checking his tattoos, they would have realized he was a member of the gang — disqualifying him from entry into the United States, she alleged.

In that case, Nobles claimed, her daughter would still be alive.

“I want everyone to know what’s going on at the border,” she said. “I had no clue what was going on before my daughter was brutally murdered and raped — but I do now.

Nobody did their job. Nobody did something as simple as raising his shirt to see the MS-13 tattoo. No one called El Salvador. And the open border policies of the Biden White House have made the jobs of those agents at the border, and at holding facilities, hard to do with as many people as are streaming across the border. It’s not like the MS-13 teen snuck across the border, he was caught there. Went through multiple layers of DHS and HHS. And the failures led to a young female American citizen being raped and murdered.

Read: Mom Of Daughter Murdered By MS-13 Members Sues DHS »

Posted in Government, Illegal Immigration, Joe Biden | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

Who’s Up For A “Gray Swan” Climate Or Something?

By William Teach January 22, 2024 – 3:26 pm

And here we go with yet another crazy climate cult term. Will this be part of duckspeak?

Prepare for a ‘Gray Swan’ Climate

…

Instead, the way to think about climate change now is through two interlinked concepts. The first is nonlinearity, the idea that change will happen by factors of multiplication, rather than addition. The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience. (snip)

Among these new extremes will be gray-swan events. These are not like black-swan events, which Shaw described as completely “unpredictable or unforeseeable.” Instead, scientists will start to observe things that they can foresee based on physics, but that haven’t appeared in the historical record before. “As we reflect, as climate scientists, on events that we see emerging, there are these record-shattering, extreme events,” she said. “Events like that truly push the boundaries of what our models are capable of.”

The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave was one example. Though weather models did predict a heat wave, forecasts did not accurately foresee how extreme the high temperatures would get. It was an unprecedented situation; typically, when temperature records are broken, they are by a fraction of a degree. This time, temperatures soared more than five degrees Celsius higher than the all-time maximum temperatures in several places. The region—which had some of the lowest rates of air-conditioning in the country at the time—was woefully underprepared. Streets buckled. Cable lines melted. Hundreds of people died while people in prisons were trapped in sweltering cells. The area had never seen anything like it.

Later, analyses found that climate models could predict something like the Pacific Northwest heat wave, but that they would be labeled as extremely rare—one in 100,000 years. It’s physically possible, but we hadn’t ever seen it.

Well, it’s easy to fit what happened into their models after the event has happened, eh? So far, though, virtually nothing the climate cult has predicted has come true. I mean, I can predict that the NJ Devils are going to win the Stanley Cup at some point in the next 30 years (they damned well better, and the sooner the better). In my analyses, I’ve determined that the Devils have won 3 Cups and played in 5 since 1995. Of course, that actually happened. The cult scientists, well, more like computer modelers, simply decided to fit what happened in the Pacific NW into their cult dogma.

“That’s ultimately the thing that we are concerned about; when you start to see very extreme behavior in places that haven’t seen it before, this can compound vulnerabilities,” Shaw said. In places without the infrastructure to handle it, any given disaster will be that much more deadly and damaging. And gray-swan events are likely to become part of our climatic landscape. “Unfortunately, we are seeing the signal emerge.”

Yeah, that sounds like Duckspeak, and doom-mongering. These wackos expect the weather to be the same all the time and utterly predictable. Who’s crazier: these folks or flat earthers?

Read: Who’s Up For A “Gray Swan” Climate Or Something? »

Posted in Climate Cult, Global Warming | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach January 22, 2024 – 1:00 pm

…are horrible fossil fueled boats, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Victory Girls Blog, with a post on DeSantis ending his campaign.

Read: If All You See… »

Posted in If All You See | 9 Comments | Trackback URL

Canada Considering Measures To Limit Migrants Entering The Nation Demanding Asylum

By William Teach January 22, 2024 – 10:30 am

This is strange. I thought Canada was accepting of every migrant/illegal who wanted to come to Canada. I remember them giving Donald Trump grief over his attempts to limit people coming across the border. I also remember that Justin Trudeau removed the visa requirement for Mexican nationals, which has helped drive this shady asylum migration

Canada weighing extra border measures for asylum seekers from Mexico – minister

Canada is weighing a number of measures to prevent Mexican nationals from flying into the country to request asylum, a top official said on Sunday, after Quebec’s premier said earlier this week the lack of visa requirements for Mexican travelers meant more refugees were arriving by plane.

Speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he and the Immigration Minister Marc Miller were considering visas and other measures.

The two ministers are looking for “the appropriate way to ensure that people who arrived from Mexico arrived for the appropriate reasons and that this doesn’t become sort of a side door to get access to Canada,” LeBlanc said.

“We’re looking at a number of measures that would, in fact, put us in a position to have done what’s necessary to ensure that these flights directly from Mexico don’t become sort of an indirect way to get access to Canada and to claim asylum,” he added.

In other words, they want to stop all those migrants/illegals from flying in with a stated other reason and then declaring asylum, at which point Canada has to spend gobs of money to support them

In a letter last week, Quebec Premier Francois Legault urged Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to stem the flow of refugees into the province and to compensate it for costs, claiming Quebec’s services were close to a “breaking point” due to the rising number.

“Mexican nationals represent a growing proportion of the asylum seekers arriving in Quebec, the possibility of entering Canada from Mexico without a visa certainly explains part of the flow of asylum seekers,” Legault wrote in the letter.

Canada is also learning a valuable lesson on not controlling their border and sovereignty. I’ve been reliably told that restricting migration is raaaaacist and just mean. By the way, where are all these poor migrants getting all the money to fly to Canada? Do they realize it’s pretty cold? Canada has actually been pretty careful as to who they let in, wanting skilled workers who will assimilate, not unskilled who need government services. Further, how many of those unskilled who show up in Canada end up sneaking across the border into the U.S.?

Read: Canada Considering Measures To Limit Migrants Entering The Nation Demanding Asylum »

Posted in Illegal Immigration | 16 Comments | Trackback URL
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