Brandon Admin Blocks Another Mine Necessary To Make EVs And Green Energy Projects

Hey, remember when Democrats passed the wrongly named Inflation Reduction Act, with all its climate doom bits and bots, some of which yammered about manufacturing components in America? Things like batteries, requiring American mined materials in order to qualify for tax rebates? And all the solar panels and wind turbines? And how I and other Skeptics said that both Biden and enviroweenies would look to shut down any attempted mining?

Biden admin issues 20-year mining ban as it turns to foreign supply chain amid green energy push

Electric vehicleThe Biden administration on Thursday announced that it would complete a 20-year withdrawal of 225,504 acres in a northern Minnesota forest area that is home to some of the largest domestic critical mineral reserves.

The action announced by the Department of the Interior (DOI) effectively prohibits mining activity from taking place in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Duluth, Minnesota, and surrounding area for the next two decades. The agency said it took the action in an effort to protect the local environment and watershed, which environmentalists worried would be contaminated by mining activity.

“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans. Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” DOI Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

It is rather interesting that all these climate cultists keep admitting that the environment gets damaged in order to produce EVs, eh? It’s also a hell of a thing that the federal government can keep clamping down on things that happen on state property. Or what should be state property.

Last year, the DOI canceled two mineral leases held by the firm Twin Metals Minnesota, which had been located in the Superior National Forest located outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. As a result of that decision and the action Thursday, domestic mining companies will effectively be banned from operating in the region for the foreseeable future and the forest’s vast critical mineral resources will be left untapped.

However, Twin Metals’ mining project contained about 88% of the nation’s cobalt reserves in addition to vast copper, nickel and platinum-group elements. Such critical minerals are vital for various green energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries, battery storage facilities, solar panels and wind turbines, which the Biden administration has aggressively pushed.

It might take a Republican president to make this happen. Again, I’m not against EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, etc, I’m against citizens being forced into them along with replacing affordable, dependable “dirty” energy with unreliable, expensive “green” energy.

The State Department recently signed an agreement that opens the door to financing mining projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which mined more than 70% of the global supply of cobalt in 2021 and is home to 3.5 million metric tons of cobalt reserves. But independent investigations conducted in recent years have found that cobalt mines in the DRC employ child laborers.

The Biden admin’s cool with environmental damage (and child labor, some of it forced) in 3rd world shitholes like DRC.

“It’s difficult to square the announcement of this significant land withdrawal with the Biden administration’s stated goals on electrification, the energy transition and supply chain security,” said National Mining Association President and CEO Rich Nolan in a statement. “At a time when demand for minerals such as copper, nickel and cobalt are skyrocketing for use in electric vehicles and solar and wind infrastructure, the administration is withdrawing hundreds of thousands of acres of land that could provide U.S. manufacturers with plentiful sources of these same minerals.”

Yeah, well, I told you this would happen. Not that it was all that difficult to predict.

Read: Brandon Admin Blocks Another Mine Necessary To Make EVs And Green Energy Projects »

U.S. Intel Chief Gives Pessimistic View Of Ukraine War

She probably got a good talking to from the White House after this

U.S. intel chief warns of ‘devastating’ impact of Russian missile attacks

Joe Biden Ice Cream AfghanistanPresident Biden’s chief intelligence adviser raised fresh concerns Thursday night that Russian missile attacks are having a “devastating” impact on the Ukrainian economy, noting that the war has already reduced the country’s gross domestic product by nearly one-third.

Wait, if the war is as damaging as we’ve been told, how is their GDP only down one-third? Why does the U.S. taxpayer need to be dumping tens of billions every couple months into Ukraine?

Speaking during a question-and-answer session at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said U.S. officials so far “do not see any reduction in the resolve of the Ukrainians to fight this war.”

But at the same time, Haines seemed to offer a more sobering view of the conflict than most Biden administration officials have shared to date. She said the “brutal” missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure are taking a far bigger toll than has been publicly understood.

Haines touted the administration’s declassification of intelligence last year that revealed Russia’s intentions to invade Ukraine during a period when European allies were skeptical that President Vladimir Putin would actually go through with it. And she said the U.S. has continued to provide important tactical battlefield intelligence to the Ukrainian military.

Well, with Trump in the White House Putin wasn’t making moves. Biden comes in and shows his weakness, especially with his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, and Putin is emboldened.

But she also described the war as having devolved into a “grinding conflict” where the movements are in “hundreds of meters.” The frontlines, she noted, have mostly remained “relatively static” even while the Russians press an offensive in the eastern Donbas region in which they have made “very incremental progress.”

So, essentially, the Biden position that Ukraine is slowly winning is a load of mule fritters. It looks like Putin is trying to grind it out and not destroy everything in the country they’re looking to take over. Putin knows that the West will only back Ukraine for so long before the citizens tire of funding this.

Read: U.S. Intel Chief Gives Pessimistic View Of Ukraine War »

The Horror: Google Let Daily Wire Advertise On “Climate Change Is A Hoax” Searches

Seriously, this is a thing that is getting the UK Guardian bent out of shape over? How about all those Elites taking private fossil fueled jets to climate meetings?

Google let Daily Wire advertise on ‘climate change is a hoax’ searches

Green Climate Thought PoliceA media outlet founded by conservative influencer Ben Shapiro paid Google to advertise on search pages questioning whether the climate crisis is real, according to new research from a disinformation watchdog group.

The Daily Wire bought ads on search terms over the past year such as “climate change is a hoax” and “why is climate change fake”, meaning that when people Googled these phrases, stories from Shapiro’s outlet were some of the first results that appeared, the research found.

Google sold these ads even after announcing a new policy in October 2021 prohibiting ads that promote climate crisis denial. Its CEO, Sundar Pichai, publicly stated at the time that “when people come to Google Search with questions about climate change, we’ll show authoritative information from sources like the United Nations”.

“Google’s hypocrisy knows no bounds,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the US and UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, which provided its research exclusively to the Guardian. “They’re actually selling the right to climate deniers to spread disinformation.” (snip)

For its research, Ahmed’s organization relied upon a commercial analytics tool called Semrush, which is used by many Fortune 500 companies and shows the Google phrases and search terms that brands advertise on. Semrush also provides estimates of the dollar amounts companies are spending on digital marketing efforts.

This is hilariously a long article, Outraged that Google would allow this to happen. How dare they make money off of anyone who disagrees with cult doctrine! And, seriously, a group has time and the inclination to investigate this stuff? Really? This is almost as dumb as “Influencers”.  Of course, they do want to shut down opposing voices, because the climate cult cannot prove their beliefs, hence, they do not want anyone seeing information that conflicts with that doctrine.

Want to take action on climate change? These books can help.

….

To help our readers meet these challenges, Yale Climate Connections has assembled a special collection of books and reports on climate action. Each offers practical advice for individuals who want to persuade their communities to act on climate change. Some of these titles have appeared in previous bookshelves; others are newly discovered or recently published. The collection includes titles aimed at different age groups: adults, college students, young adults, and children. Many also offer inspiring personal stories of climate activism.

So if you want to up your game on climate change this year, resolve to read one of these books.

As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by the publishers or organizations that released them.

Per the descriptions of those books at the link, none seem to say “give up your own use of fossil fuels and make your lives carbon neutral.” They all but one seem to be about agitating, demonstrating, and getting Government to crack down on your money, life, and freedom of choice. And this one

Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America, by Andreas Karelas (Beacon Press 2020, 248 pages, $17.00 paperback)

Transform the economy? To what? It’s $13.99 at Amazon, and, let’s see a few reviews (it only has 9 and 20 ratings, despite being out since 2020)

  • Socialist indoctrination. It’s a shame I was forced to read this for school
  • No solutions, just a bunch of empty talking points

And none of the editorial reviews by climate cult bigshots, like Bill McKibben, mention what kind of economy they book is pushing, nor what they want to do for communities.

Read: The Horror: Google Let Daily Wire Advertise On “Climate Change Is A Hoax” Searches »

If All You See…

…is a dusty sky from carbon pollution Bad Weather, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Victory Girls Blog, with a post on Project Veritas stinging Pfizer.

Read: If All You See… »

Good News: NIH Didn’t Adequately Track Funding To Wuhan

Well, gee wiz, didn’t government officials, like Anthony Fauci, claim that there was nothing bad going on with the NIH funding China on research, that there was no gain of research happening?

‘Extremely disconcerting’: NIH didn’t track U.S. funds going to Chinese virus research, watchdog finds

Republicans PounceThe National Institutes of Health failed to provide adequate oversight of an American organization that funded controversial research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, according to a new government report that is sure to raise new questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report is evidence of “major failures in past NIH oversight of high-risk research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright told Yahoo News in an email.

Issued by the inspector general of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the new report says nothing about the origins of the coronavirus. For the most part, it concerns research that took place well before the first cases of what came to be known as SARS-CoV-2 were discovered in China in late 2019.

But it does note that the American organization in question, the EcoHealth Alliance, should have been more rigorously scrutinized by federal officials regarding assurances that its partner lab in Wuhan was not using U.S. funds to conduct gain-of-function research, which boosts viruses to study how they might evolve in nature.

“The entire picture starts to look extremely disconcerting,” mathematical biologist Alex Washburne told Yahoo News. He said that a project on coronaviruses originating in bats, for which the EcoHealth Alliance had given a grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “was clearly gain-of-function research.”

Good job, NIH, good job! Giving lots of U.S. taxpayer to a foreign entity in a country that is an adversary, one with a poor record on containing leaks of diseases, and failing to monitor it properly. Then lying about it to the American people. But, of course

Republicans seized on the findings, with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — a skeptic of virtually every aspect of the official coronavirus narrative — charging that the NIH “failed to conduct adequate oversight.”

China hawks will also be emboldened, accusing President Biden of not being forceful enough with the East Asian superpower.

Seizing! Anyhow, it’s fun how we are allowed to talk about this now, at the tail end of Wuhan flu, 3 years later. How the news is now saying things, questioning things, things that people were being shut down over back in 2020, 2021, being called nuts and conspiracy theorists, eh?

Meanwhile

California law aiming to curb COVID misinformation blocked by judge

A U.S. judge has blocked a California law that sought to penalize doctors who spread “misinformation or disinformation” about COVID-19 while he considers a pair lawsuits challenging it on free speech grounds.

Senior U.S. District Judge William Shubb in Sacramento ruled on Wednesday that Assembly Bill 2098, which was signed last October by California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, was too vague for doctors to know what kind of statements might put them at risk of being penalized.”COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus,” he wrote.

Too bad he didn’t block it due to being a massive infringement on Free Speech, both in the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution. But, I guess he’s trying to play it safe while waiting for the lawsuits to happen

The preliminary order means that the law cannot be enforced while Shubb hears two lawsuits brought against the law shortly after its passage last year – one by a group of five doctors, and another by a doctor and two advocacy groups including Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Children’s Health Defense, which has long promoted false information about standard childhood vaccines.

“This Act is a blatant attempt to silence doctors whose views, though based on thorough scientific research, deviate from the government-approved ‘party line,'” said Greg Dolin of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a lawyer for the doctors, in a statement. “At no point has the State of California been able to articulate the line between permissible and impermissible speech.”

This is what Gavin Newsom calls freedom, the government censoring people for Wrongthink.

Read: Good News: NIH Didn’t Adequately Track Funding To Wuhan »

Washington Representative Notes Climate Crisis (scam) Bill Will Increase Cost Of Living

Guess who gets to pay the price for Government climate apocalypse bills? It’s not the Elites, especially those who pass the bills

(560KPQ) A local legislator is speaking out against a proposed climate change bill that would impose new requirements on cities and counties across Washington State.

Supporters of the bill say it’s a step forward to making Washington a more climate friendly state by reducing urban sprawl and greenhouse emissions.

12th District Representative Keith Goehner says the legislature continues to add more requirements making these goals extremely difficult.

“And if we got two or three objectives and concepts being put forward without clear understanding of how that’s going to impact people’s lives, we need to step back and be very judicious on how we proceed.” Goehner said. “When you look at the cost of living in this day and age, what are we doing and what are we getting for the return on that additional cost. It’s always the taxpayer/consumer that’s having to pay for that.”

This week, the bill passed through the House Local Government Committee by a four to three vote.

Yes, the peasants will have to pay for it. And have to live with it, while the Elites will continue living their big carbon footprint lives, traveling in fossil fueled vehicles, taking private jets, living in big mansions with expansive lawns, etc and so on. Can’t wait till the leftist, climate scam believing citizens of Washington realize their beliefs are hosing their lives.

Read: Washington Representative Notes Climate Crisis (scam) Bill Will Increase Cost Of Living »

And Now Ukraine Wants Fighter Jets

This just keeps getting better and better, considering Ukraine hasn’t even received any tanks yet and won’t for months. Meaning this war will just keep going and going

Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies

Ukraine will now push for Western fourth generation fighter jets such as the U.S. F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister said.

Ukraine won a huge boost for its troops on Wednesday as Germany and the United States announced plans to provide heavy tanks for Kyiv, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue.

“The next big hurdle will now be the fighter jets,” Yuriy Sak, who advises Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters by phone.

Ukraine’s Air Force has a fleet of ageing Soviet-era fighter jets that came off the assembly line before Kyiv even declared independence more than 31 years ago. The warplanes are used for intercept missions and to attack Russian positions.

“If we get them (Western fighter jets), the advantages on the battlefield will be just immense… It’s not just F-16s (U.S. multirole fighter jets): fourth generation aircraft, this is what we want.”

Pretty sure these would not be used for defense. How will Russia respond with NATO supplied fighter jets flying over and fighting over Russian territory?

Western military support has been vital for Kyiv and has rapidly evolved during the war. Before the invasion, even the idea of supplying lethal aid to Ukraine was highly controversial but Western supplies have since shattered taboo after taboo.

“They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” Sak said.

It would take quite some time for pilots to be trained on the F-16s. How much longer do they expect this war to continue? What will this do to NATP military preparedness? Germany is down to barebones, the UK is down, the US is down. Hey, just wondering, it would be a total conspiracy theory to think that Russia is slow walking the war to destroy NATO stockpiles? Maybe with Zelensky’s help?

(Newsweek) German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock isn’t bashful about laying blame on Russia as its war in Ukraine surpasses 11 months.

Baerbock used a significant portion of her keynote address Tuesday at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, to defend law, democracy and human rights in response to “Russia’s murderous attack on the people of Ukraine.”

“We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other,” Baerbock said, according to the A News TV network.

Politicians are working to get us into WWIII

Read: And Now Ukraine Wants Fighter Jets »

Surprise: US Transitioning To EVs Could Cause Environmental Havoc

The UK Guardian is one of the leading climahysteric mainstream news outlets, and unabashedly admit that they are biased. They were also leaders in pushing people to be forced into EVs. But, now?

Revealed: how US transition to electric cars threatens environmental havoc

The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.

It warns that unless the US’s dependence on cars in towns and cities falls drastically, the transition to lithium battery-powered electric vehicles by 2050 will deepen global environmental and social inequalities linked to mining – and may even jeopardize the 1.5C global heating target.

But ambitious policies investing in mass transit, walkable towns and cities, and robust battery recycling in the US would slash the amount of extra lithium required in 2050 by more than 90%.

In fact, this first-of-its-kind modeling shows it is possible to have more transport options for Americans that are safer, healthier and less segregated, and less harmful mining while making rapid progress to zero emissions.

In other words, EVs are not acceptable for the peasants, who should be forced out of their privately owned vehicles and into mass transit, bikes, and walking. I will admit, though, some cities do need to cut down on their private vehicles. NYC is a mess. It used to be OK to drive in for the day, not anymore. Anyhow, even those who do not live in big cities need to have their private vehicles restricted, per the climate cult.

The global demand for lithium, also known as white gold, is predicted to rise over 40 times by 2040, driven predominantly by the shift to electric vehicles. Grassroots protests and lawsuits against lithium mining are on the rise from the US and Chile to Serbia and Tibet amid rising concern about the socio-environmental impacts and increasingly tense geopolitics around supply.

The climate cult creates the problem by getting government to force people into EVs they can barely afford, then says EVs are bad. Go figure

The US’s affinity for cars, especially big ones, and sprawling cities and suburbs where driving to work, school and shop is often the only option, gives its transition to electric vehicles major global significance.

Tough. Mind your own business. You do you, the rest of us will live our lives. Also, yes, all that lithium mining does create an actual environmental mess. Thanks, Warmists.

Read: Surprise: US Transitioning To EVs Could Cause Environmental Havoc »

If All You See…

…is a wonderful low carbon bike that Everyone Else should be forced to ride, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is This ain’t Hell…, with a post on some feel good stories.

Read: If All You See… »

Kamala Turns Monterey Park Memorial Into Gun Grabbing Rally

She didn’t quite explain what laws would have stopped the unhinged, wacko shooter

Harris visits Monterey Park to meet with victims’ families

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Monterey Park, California, on Wednesday to meet with victims’ families days after a mass shooter there killed 11 and wounded at least nine others at a Lunar New Year celebration inside a dance studio.

Harris visited Star Dance Studio to mourn the loss of the victims of the Monterey Park shooting, expressing the administration’s “deepest condolences and sorrows for the violent and tragic and useless thing that happened” there.

The vice president, carrying a large bouquet of Yellow lilies and white roses, took time looking at each of the 11 memorials set up at the dance studio in honor of the victims.

After paying her respects, the Vice President laid the bouquet down, and walked to the press, delivering short remarks– urging that the country take action to address the all-too-common tragedies.

“You know we’ve already had in our country this year — already, we’re in January — It’s estimated over 40 mass killings already. And tragically, we keep saying the same thing. I have had the unfortunate experience of visiting many of these sites, sometimes within days of a massacre like this. We will always, as a compassionate nation, mourn for the loss and pray for those who survive in their recover. But we must also require that leaders of nations who have the ability and the power and the responsibility to do something, that they act,” Harris said.

Harris praised California for their work on smart gun safety laws, but stressed that Congress must take action for the country as a whole, and “have courage to do the right thing.”

Harris was asked if she believed the current Congress could act on gun reform and gave a sharp answer.

The gun the wacko used to kill all those people was illegal to possess in California. It’s also illegal to have a 30 round magazine in the People’s Republik Of California. It’s very strange that people committing the felony crime of murder refuse to follow all the laws on firearms. California gets an A from the Giffords gun grabbing group, and was at the top of Everytown’s gun grabbing list. Yet, “gun violence” and mass shootings seem to keep happening in the PRC.

The gun grabbers will say “but, if we do this nationwide, they won’t be able to go to other states to get these”, forgetting that they also want open borders, and it’s rather easy to smuggle stuff into the U.S. So law abiding citizens looking to protect themselves will have a tough time, while criminals will have lots of guns.

(CBS News) In the wake of two mass shootings in California, President Joe Biden on Tuesday again called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, just a few months after he signed into law bipartisan gun control legislation that fell short of banning the deadly weapons.

He doesn’t have the votes. But, tell you what: if federal agencies, starting with the US Secret Service, get rid of all their own assault rifles, which are often automatic, and extended magazines, then I’ll consider it.

Read: Kamala Turns Monterey Park Memorial Into Gun Grabbing Rally »

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