Joe Manchin Attempts To Pitch His Permitting Scheme To Big Wig Elites

Now, streamlining permitting is a darned good idea. Unfortunately, Manchin made a massive mistake in giving his vote for Build Back Better v4, er, (won’t reduce) Inflation Reduction Act in exchange for a promise to get his streamlining scheme passed in a future bill, because too many hyper-left Democrats are trying to scuttle it, and now Republicans are refusing to play along

Manchin’s pitch to energy leaders: IRA without permitting reform a missed opportunity

Sen. Joe Manchin pitched his permitting reform legislation to a crowd of global energy leaders and private sector executives as essential to achieving the full goals of the Inflation Reduction Act he helped craft.

The West Virginia Democrat also told the crowd at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum in Pittsburgh that the Senate would start voting on the permitting legislation next week, likely on Tuesday. But the legislation faces stiff opposition in both parties.

Manchin’s appearance was disrupted by a handful of protesters seemingly opposed to the bill’s provisions aimed to help spur completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which the senator is a staunch advocate of. This followed a protest Thursday against permitting of natural gas infrastructure at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by opponents of efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure in the United States.

It would be great if the permitting scheme does get passed

Most of the developed world can build and permit infrastructure in a few years, but the U.S. permitting process can take as long as a decade, Manchin said.

“Why should we be at a disadvantage and can’t compete?” he said. “We know what needs to be done. Why can’t we be able to do it?”

In the Inflation Reduction Act, “everything’s based on a 10-year window,” Manchin added. “If it takes seven to eight years or longer to permit something, we’re going to miss the window for having those investments come to fruition and you miss that window, then you’re going to have money stranded out there.”

Yes, it does take way too long, and the lunatics sue left and right to stop the project, and can usually find a sympathetic judge to jam up the works.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters Friday the Biden administration supports the deal that it took to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, including the permitting bill.

“We are very excited at DOE about the potential for streamlined permitting on clean energy projects,” she said. “I think that holds the greatest promise for the goals we’d like to achieve which is, of course, to get to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.”

So, even if it gets passed, it won’t get used for fossil fuels projects. Good work, Joe, good work. Really, he got played, and sold out the people of West Virginia, and the rest of the United States. The final result will be fastrack permitting for “green” energy projects, and nothing for pipelines and such.

Read: Joe Manchin Attempts To Pitch His Permitting Scheme To Big Wig Elites »

Bummer: Sales Of Large Pickups And SUVs Is Harming Carbon Pollution Reduction From EVs

In the real world, these are the vehicles people want, especially SUVs

Surging sales of large gasoline pickups and SUVs are undermining carbon reductions from electric cars

Replacing petroleum fuels with electricity is crucial for curbing climate change because it cuts carbon dioxide emissions from transportation – the largest source of U.S. global warming emissions and a growing source worldwide. Even including the impacts of generating electricity to run them, electric vehicles provide clear environmental benefits.

Plug-in vehicles are making great progress, with their share of U.S. car and light truck sales jumping from 2% to 4% in 2020-2021 and projected to exceed 6% by the end of 2022. But sales of gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs are also surging. This other face of the market subverts electric cars’ carbon-cutting progress.

People want these vehicles. Many manufacturers had already mostly stopped making sedans. Others stopped offering sub-compact cars, like the Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris. Nissan still has the Versa, but, it doesn’t sell well, they do not make that many right now, and most go to rental car companies. The subcompact SUV class, though, which includes ones like the Honda HRV, Toyota CHR, and Kia Soul, are selling like gangbusters. RAV4s, CRVs, and other compact SUVs likewise sell big time. Many people are interested in the regular hybrid versions. People are interested in getting a mid-sized hybrid, but, not much going on there. People just do not want to deal with the charging issues of an EV. Or the pricing.

In spite of rapidly growing sales, however, EVs have not yet measurably cut carbon. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data indicates that the rate of carbon dioxide reduction from new vehicles has all but stalled, while vehicle mass and power have reached all-time highs.

Why? The surging popularity of low-fuel-economy pickups and SUVs. My analysis of the EPA data shows that through 2021, the higher emissions from market shifts to larger, more powerful vehicles swamp the potential carbon dioxide reductions from EVs by more than a factor of three.

Consumers make the choice. It shouldn’t be Government demanding it. If Warmists want EVs, let them go get one, and stop telling everyone else how to live their lives and what products companies can sell. And, as usual, John DeCicco, Research Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, who wrote this piece, fails to note that he’s switched to an EV.

Policymakers and environmental organizations have mounted major promotional campaigns in support of EVs. But there are no similar efforts to encourage consumers to choose the most efficient vehicle that meets their needs. Significant numbers of Americans now believe that global warming is for real and of concern. Connecting such beliefs to everyday vehicle purchases is a missing link in clean-car strategy.

Mind your own business. Stop minding everyone else’s.

Read: Bummer: Sales Of Large Pickups And SUVs Is Harming Carbon Pollution Reduction From EVs »

If All You See…

…is an Evil fossil fueled vehicle, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Moonbattery, with a post on indoctrination in the U.S. Air Force.

Doubleshot below the fold, check out Pacific Pundit, with a post on creepy Biden saying he was creeping on a 12 year old when he was 30.

Read More »

Read: If All You See… »

Brandonconomy: Beer Shortages Could Be Coming

No worries, Biden is heading to New Castle, Delaware today, after having a nice concert featuring Elton John Friday night. He’s on the ball and will take care of this

Is a beer shortage on tap? Inflation and supply chain pressures on brewers are intensifying

We have endured no shortage of shortages recently. There was toilet paper and computer chips, followed by tampons and baby formula. Could the next shortage involve beer?

The potential arises as beer makers, big and small, are under pressure from a confluence of inflation and several supply chain issues. Some breweries have found it challenging to get carbon dioxide (CO2), which is used to clean tanks and carbonate beer. When they do get it, the price is often higher, sometimes twice what they used to pay.

Also rising: the price of other ingredients such as malted barley and the cost to ship that and other products.

All this could lead to higher beer prices. And, it could result in some of your favorite beers being out of stock or not on tap.

“I don’t know if I can think of a scenario where there’d be no beer from a brewery, but I can understand a scenario where there would be a limited or smaller offering, as beer has a short shelf life,” said Chuck Aaron, owner and founder of Jersey Girl Brewing in Hackettstown, N.J.

Unlike with many products, such as eggs and other things that have disappeared from the grocery stores, there really isn’t a generic brand of beer (except on TV and in the movies), but, many craft brewers might reduce output or shut down

The environment is challenging enough that it could force some breweries to close. “This could certainly be a factor in closures,” Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association, told USA TODAY.

The big brewers will just raise prices. You’re already seeing it, as the cost of diesel for the trucks that deliver the necessary goods to make it have gone up (barley up double, aluminum up 50%), and then trucks have to take the made beer to stores. Will production be reduced from the big brewers? They have the product to make beer. Except there is a shortage of glass, aluminum, and CO2.

Despite the dilemma, the nation’s beer taps won’t likely run dry. But they could be tempered, he said.

“I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say there will be shortages. Individual producers may have issues, but this isn’t so widespread that you’re going to see empty beer shelves,” Watson said. “I think the beer brand that consumers want occasionally being out of stock is closer to accurate. And brewers might make different or fewer beers.”

Just one more thing we can thank China for. And Fauci and the National Institute of Health, for funding gain of function research in Wuhan, at a facility that has shown itself lax. Biden will be absent, as usual.

Read: Brandonconomy: Beer Shortages Could Be Coming »

Climate Lunatic Sets Himself On Fire At Tennis Match

Seriously, this is what you get when people are fed a constant diet of apocalyptic doom

From the link

A protestor ran onto the court and set his arm on fire in the middle of the 2022 Laver Cup in London on Friday. The man wore a white shirt with the words “end UK private jets” written on it. He was quickly escorted off the court after the fire was put out by officials.

The protest temporarily halted the singles match between Stefanos Tsitsipas and Diego Schwartzman. He reportedly ran onto the court after Tsitsipas won the first set and set his arm on fire before security grabbed him. After officials determined the fire did not alter the court, the match resumed and Tsitsipas won the second set to clinch the victory.

Here’s what it looked like

End UK private jets is exactly what you think

While the act itself was unceremonious, the message finds plenty of relevance at a time when climate action and justice are as essential as ever. A study published in Science Direct has revealed how private jets, with fewer than 10 people on board, account for about 7,500 tons of carbon emissions every year, way more than commercial aviation.

The startling growth in private aviation in recent years has become an alarming addition to climate change and is a crucial topic of dialogue in climate activism. Therefore, it is not a matter of surprise that an intruder found it pertinent to display such a message at a tournament whose participants flew in by private jets.

Perhaps he should have waited to pull his stunt during the next climate cult Conference on the Parties, which will be held in the fancy vacation spot of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt during November, what with all the big wigs flying in on private jets.

Read: Climate Lunatic Sets Himself On Fire At Tennis Match »

Americans Are No Longer Buying Into COVID Boosters

The problem is that people really do not trust them that much anymore. There are way too many data points on people who’ve gotten them getting COVID, and then reinfections in short order. The only benefit is, supposedly, keeping people from getting a bad case of COVID

Data show just 4.4 million Americans have had the new COVID booster, but experts expect accelerating demand in the coming weeks

The first tallies for the new bivalent booster are out, with some 4.4 million people in the U.S. having received the updated shot, according to health officials. Meanwhile, public health experts continue to fret about President Joe Biden’s recent remark that “the pandemic is over.”

Health experts said it is too early to predict whether demand would match up with the 171 million doses of the new booster that the U.S. ordered for the fall, the Associated Press reported. The new shot targets the most common omicron strains as well as the original virus strain.

“No one would go looking at our flu shot uptake at this point and be like, ‘Oh, what a disaster,’” David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the AP. “If we start to see a large uptick in cases, I think we’re going to see a lot of people getting the [new COVID] vaccine.”

Most have moved on. A lot of people have removed themselves from the mask cult. And no one trusts the data on how good the booster works.

The daily average for new cases stood at 55,591 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 19% from two weeks ago. But cases are rising in 20 states, and are up by a lot in some.

Washington state has seen a 47% increase in cases in the last two weeks, while New York is up 45%, Massachusetts is up 40%, Maine is up 36% and New Jersey is up 32%.

So, places which had been epicenters of COVID vaccine worship and massive restricts. The Powers That Be want to try to keep scaring us. Most of us are done with this.

Read: Americans Are No Longer Buying Into COVID Boosters »

Top Bank Execs Tell Rashida Tlaib She’s Nuts Regarding Climate Doom

They missed a great opportunity to ask Tlaib if she’s stopped using fossil fuels herself. Perhaps it’s just me, but, when someone starts yammering about climate doom that’s the first question I ask them

Top bank CEOs decline radical climate demands from Rep. Tlaib: ‘That would be the road to Hell for America’

Leaders in the banking industry clashed with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Wednesday after Tlaib demanded that they commit to immediately end all financing of all fossil fuel products.

J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon told the far-left representative during a House Financial Services Committee hearing that her request would lead to despair and ruin.

“You have all committed, as you all know, to transition the emissions from lending and investment activities to align with pathways to net-zero in 2050… So no new fossil fuel production, starting today, so that’s like zero. I would like to ask all of you and go down the list, cause again, you all have agreed to doing this. Please answer with a simple yes or no, does your bank have a policy against funding new oil and gas products, Mr. Diamond?” Tlaib asked.

“Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America,” Dimon responded.

And they all told Tlaib that they would continue to loan money, because, you know, that’s what banks do. If doing away with fossil fuels was so easy, then, why have most Warmists not done so? Who wants to bet that Tlaib flies back and forth between D.C. and Michigan?

Critics of the environmental policies Tlaib advocates, argue that those policies have already reduced funding to fossil fuel projects which has exacerbated the energy shortages seen in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year. American financier Kyle Bass, for example, argued that the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy must not be rushed.

“These transitions take forty years, Joe. The move from coal to natural gas took forty years. They take a very, very, very long time. We can’t just flip a switch,” he told CNBC in an interview last month.

And how’s that working in Europe?

Read: Top Bank Execs Tell Rashida Tlaib She’s Nuts Regarding Climate Doom »

If All You See…

…is a scary looking sky from carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Legal Insurrection, with a post on the Martha’s Vineyard’s Citizens For Sanity ad. Progressive or parody?

Read: If All You See… »

Time: Shipping Migrants To Sanctuary Cities Is An Attack On The Constitution Or Something

Well, this is a new one. There have plenty of attacks on DeSantis and Abbott, even accusing them of trafficking, as you well know. Now we have attacking the Constitution

Republican Governors Shipping Migrants Around the Country Is a Disturbing Attack on the Constitution

(Multiple paragraphs about the shipping of the illegals/migrants, all of which you know)

President Biden and others have derided these trips, as well as the ones arranged by DeSantis, as “political stunts.” They are more disturbing than that. They are lawless acts, deliberate attempts by some states, acting through their governors, to contravene the basic premise and purpose of the union established by the U.S. Constitution.

States have always had to find ways to coexist even when they have divergent interests or policy preferences. The Constitution itself was adopted to resolve coordination difficulties the states had in matters such as national defense, the conduct of foreign affairs, the creation of a common currency, and financing a national government. The federal courts, also established by the Constitution and further developed by Congress, provide another avenue where states can peacefully and lawfully resolve their differences, adjudicating particular disputes that arise between them. Even before such fights ripen into lawsuits, states, like individuals, sometimes need to negotiate terms of cooperation with one another. There is an established legal mechanism for doing this, called an interstate compact. It, too, is rooted in the United States Constitution, which has been interpreted by federal courts to set ground rules for ensuring such state-to-state agreements have the assent of the federal government.

TexasArizona, and Florida are all already party to numerous interstate compacts, spanning everything from multistate lotteries to water apportionment to child custody and adoption to professional licensing. Had Abbott, Ducey and DeSantis been trying to develop multistate mechanisms for accommodating asylum seekers and other lawful migrants, they could have approached their counterparts in other states to hash out an agreed upon plan.

That’s the argument from Heidi Li Feldman, a Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University Law Center. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abbott, DeSantis, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey didn’t establish a compact to ship illegals/migrants to Democratic Party run areas which call themselves sanctuary cities. That’s some serious weak sauce from a professor of law. There is a compact, in which people can cross borders of states as much as they want if they’re here.

And, not one word from Feldman regarding Biden flying the same people around the country in the dead of night and dropping them off in small town America with zero warning.

Instead, Abbott, Ducey, and now DeSantis have chosen to ambush the governments of sister states by surprising them with the arrival of busloads and planeloads of migrants at unannounced times and places. They have refused requests from mayors in other states to work together. The buses and planes sent by Abbott, Ducey, and DeSantis discharge their passengers wherever will get the most press coverage or will cause inconvenience and difficulties for residents and government responders.

Ambush? Now, that’s funny. Still no mention of Biden doing this. Or, border states being ambushed by massive inflows of migrants/illegals.

The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly forbid one state from purposely creating disorder in another. But attempts to do this subvert one basic premise for joining together in legal union: peaceful, cooperative co-existence among states, as well as between them and the federal government. As state governors, Ducey, Abbott, and DeSantis have acted extra-constitutionally, even anti-constitutionally. While they have not launched armed attacks on other states or the federal government, they have shown a refusal to participate in the basic design and ambition of the American constitutional union. That is a step toward secession.

So, sending these migrants creates disorder to non-border states, ones who advocate for open borders and now get to share in it? It’s silly, very silly, but, the point here is not to create a strong argument, it’s to create a talking point that the three governors and their states are violating the Constitution (the same one Democrats hate because it stop their authoritarianism).

Read: Time: Shipping Migrants To Sanctuary Cities Is An Attack On The Constitution Or Something »

LA Times: Americans Don’t Care About Climate Doom Or Something

This has given LA Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg a big sad

Nicholas Goldberg: Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up

Why is the greatest threat to the planet of so little concern to most Americans?

It couldn’t possibly be due to the fact that those pushing this the hardest seem to always fail to mention what they’ve done in their own lives, could it? That they show themselves as climahypocrites? That they want Other People to be forced to practice the beliefs that the Warmists won’t?

It’s shocking, frankly, that global warming ranks 24th on a list of 29 issues that voters say they’ll think about when deciding whom to vote for in November, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Only 30% of voters say they are “very worried” about it and more than two-thirds say they “rarely” or “never” discuss the issue with family or friends.

No, it really isn’t. When a slight increase in global temperatures in 170 years is matched up against real issues it loses. Many care about it in theory, but, not in practice. And this is after 30+ years of fearmongering, which has really gotten bad over the last 10 or so

How can people be so blithely unconcerned when the clear consensus of scientists is that climate disruption is reaching crisis levels and will result not only in more raging storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, but very possibly in famine, mass migration, collapsing economies and war?

Because science is not consensus, and, if it was all so bad, people like Nicholas would tell us how they’ve started driving an EV and made their lives carbon neutral. I’ve read a lot of ‘climate change’ articles over the years. A lot. And of all those, perhaps less than .5% mention what these people have actually done in their own lives.

In his forthcoming book, “The Activist’s Media Handbook,” due out in November, David Fenton says that the forces trying to rouse the world to fight climate change — including philanthropic foundations, environmental organizations and activist groups, among others — have by and large ignored the most rudimentary tenets of marketing and advertising, to their detriment and the planet’s.

That’s because they believe that the business of selling ideas is fundamentally dirty, manipulative and beneath them.

They’re convinced that data, truth and evidence are what matter, Fenton says. To them (and we’re talking here about lots of well-intentioned lawyers, scientists and people who studied the humanities), good ideas sell themselves.

But, see, they don’t provide data, truth, and evidence. They rely on scaremongering, doomsaying, computer models, crystal ball, and a failure to, yes, practice what they preach. And, among the same old ideas, such as keeping the message simple, Nicholas never recommends that practicing what you preach idea.

Read: LA Times: Americans Don’t Care About Climate Doom Or Something »

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