…is a building that will soon be inundated by the rising seas, you might just be a Warmist
The blog of the day is Chicks On The Right, with a post on Pam Bondi warning Excitable Jasmine Crockett.
Read: If All You See… »
…is a building that will soon be inundated by the rising seas, you might just be a Warmist
The blog of the day is Chicks On The Right, with a post on Pam Bondi warning Excitable Jasmine Crockett.
Read: If All You See… »
To be clear, Trump is not trying to eliminate FEMA. He couldn’t if he wanted to, it was created by Congress. He is trying to seriously cut it back, though
Deanne Criswell has spent years sounding the alarm about busier disaster seasons. Just days before the former chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down at the end of the Biden administration, Criswell was directing the federal response to the deadly and destructive wildfires in Los Angeles.
“We’re seeing hurricane season last longer, we’re seeing spring severe weather season get more significant and we’re seeing the fire season go year-round now,” Criswell told CNN at the time. The agency is “more engaged in wildfire response than we ever have been before.”
It’s not just FEMA’s perception that threats are increasing — there were 90 declarations of “major disasters” in 2024.
Declaring disasters quickly is not the same as actually having them. Why? Because governors are quick to declare disaster in order to get that sweet, sweet federal money, and presidents are happy to follow along in order to look good and spread their benevolent money around to help with re-election.
Researchers also found that 41% of the US population lived in a county where a major disaster or emergency was declared — about 137 million people.
“Our analysis of FEMA data shows the agency has been responding to a growing number of climate-driven disasters over the past few decades. This is in line with what scientists warned us would happen,” said Sejal Patel, senior climate finance researcher at IIED, in a statement to CNN.
Again, the problem is that FEMA is way too involved and way too bossy. That is not their purpose. They’re also way to politicized and incompetent. Remember the failure of all those FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina? How many were left unused? And the rest with things like formaldehyde? They’ve failed other times, including in Western NC.
It comes as the Trump administration plans for deep staff cuts at FEMA.
“As global temperatures continue to rise, all levels of government will have no choice but to help people adapt to the realities of climate change,” Patel said, adding political leaders should be focusing on how to adapt and build resilience against climate change threats, including solutions like stronger building codes, early warning systems, reenvisioning the homeowners insurance industry and infrastructure like flood barriers.
Sigh. And that’s one of the ways they have been politicized.
The US president can declare a major disaster or emergency for any natural event, such as hurricanes, storms, tornados and landslides, when they determine an event is severe enough to surpass the ability of state and local government to respond. It provides access to federal funding for emergency needs and permanent repairs.
But, they are making that declaration for just about everything. Was a federal one necessary for the Malibu fires? No. But, FEMA would be helpful in coordinating resources coming from outside of California to help. That’s what FEMA does: coordinate. Not take control. Or determine who gets help due to politics, like when FEMA officials were telling helpers to skip Trump supporting houses.
Let FEMA do what it was meant to do, not be in full control. It’s literally about “we’re here to help” not “step back, we’re in charge.” A lot of disasters have little need of federal disaster declarations: we didn’t get them after a big tornado 40 years ago. Now we get one after everything. How much are they helping? The Maui homes have barely been seen any rebuilding. Not much is going on in Malibu. It took Trump surging resources the Army Corps Of Engineers into Western NC. Take a scalpel to FEMA, let it go back to doing the base job.
Read: CNN Is Very Concerned Over Trump Looking To Cut FEMA »
They should be looking at lots of projects, see where the money goes. How it is spent. Is the project viable? Did it get completed? How much ended up in people’s pockets? (via Watts Up With That?)
EPA Internal Watchdog Peeks Under The Hood Of $7 Billion Biden Solar Program
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is opening an audit into a $7 billion Biden-era solar deployment program, the OIG said in a Wednesday letter.
The OIG is auditing the Solar For All program, which is part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The Biden EPA used the program to route massive checks to sixty recipients — primarily state governments —around the country so that awardees could finance solar panel deployment in low-income areas. The Trump EPA is now following up on the program’s funding.
“Our objective is to describe the status of funds, top recipients, and potential risks and impacts of the EPA’s Solar for All program within the Office of the Administrator’s Office of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” the letter reads. “We plan to conduct work at headquarters and regions, if necessary.”
That looks like political speak for “you best have covered your asses, because we’re about to be proctologists.”
Some of the states that received massive checks from the Solar for All program happen to be among the least-sunny states in the U.S.
For instance, the Executive Office of the State of New Hampshire received approximately $43.5 million from the program, and the Vermont Department of Public Service reaped nearly $62.5 million while the Maine Governor’s Energy Office raked in $62.1 from the Solar for All program. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Solar Radiation Database Physical Solar Model indicates that New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine are among the least-sunny states in the U.S.
What have they done with the money? There’s been time to get projects off the ground. Or, was it just money to pass around to Democrat donors?
Read: Uh Oh: EPA Watchdog Looking At $7 Billion Biden Solar Program »
I mean, it really is playing to the far left moonbat base. First, though, consider this by John Kass
HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES IS KILLING AMERICA
When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule.
I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:
Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground. (long, long snip of people lying to him and burning them)
But in the 21st Century an amazing thing happened to the media. Even as they mouthed their cliches about “speaking truth to power,” America’s corporate media began to openly revel at their participation in the power structure alongside their classmates and elites in the increasingly dominant managerial class. They became the willful tip of the spear for Deep State censorship and misinformation operations against populist challenges.
The Chicago political world was all about accountability not to the people, but to their fellow warlords. But the New York Times was accountable to no one.
Because of its dominant position in corporate journalism, the New York Times has never been held accountable. It leverages corporate media but has never taken responsibility for misinformation and malfeasance. The newspaper’s lies have been rewarded with dominant market position and those Pulitzer Prizes based on lies were wrapped adulation based on fear.
It’s worth the read for the entire thing. Let’s go to this at the Times
Immigrants and Freedom of Speech
The Trump administration has tried in recent weeks to deport several immigrants who spoke out against Israel. First, it arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who’d joined pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. Officials also arrested a Georgetown University researcher with an academic visa. They deported a nephrologist at Brown University, even though she had a valid visa. Another student activist at Columbia fled to Canada after immigration officials came to her home.
President Trump has said that more arrests will come — a test of the government’s ability to deport people with views that he disagrees with.
How is this legal? The First Amendment, after all, protects freedom of speech in nearly absolute terms. It allows people to espouse even the most unsavory views, including support for genocide, and face no criminal penalty as a result.
I have to wonder, how many moonbats will stop reading and go “yeah, all those visa holders deserve free speech!” Of course, German Lopez has been taking the side of the violent Palestinians and their wanting to kill Jews for a while now, so, he fails to mention that the visa holders (they are not immigrants) have advocated for killing Jews and Americans, destroying America, Israel, and the West, and have abused other students who were Jews, along with illegally taking over campus buildings. But, hey, what’s this
The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment applies to noncitizens in the United States when it comes to criminal and civil penalties. But those protections don’t necessarily apply to deportations, the court has found. The federal government has nearly absolute power over immigration, including its ability to deport noncitizens; it gets to decide who comes and then stays in this country, potentially at the expense of constitutional rights.
In 1952, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could deport immigrants for Communist Party membership without violating the First Amendment. (I experienced this firsthand: A government official asked me if I was a communist during my interview to become a U.S. citizen in the 2000s.)
So, yeah, all those Islamists on visas can have their legal status revoked and repatriated to their shithole jihadi countries.
This approach leaves immigrants with no practical free speech rights, Nadine Strossen, former president of the A.C.L.U., told me. The First Amendment allows us to speak freely without fear of legal retribution. But if an immigrant’s political advocacy gets him deported, he does have to worry about retribution — and may choose not to speak at all.
They are guests in the United States: wishing death on people is rather frowned upon, and should end with deportation in every case. When you are visiting someone’s house don’t be an asshole. Same when you visit the U.S.
In the meantime, immigrants have reason to worry. Already, college officials have warned immigrant students that nobody can protect them. In that sense, the Trump administration’s approach is already working: It has likely persuaded immigrants to stay quiet about causes that the president disagrees with.
I’m fine if Trump disagrees with wishing death on Jews and Americans.
(Update: Forgot a word in the headline)
Read: NY Times Pimps For Illegal Aliens Wishing Death On Jews And Americans »
We’re not on to invisible threats!
Pennsylvania is one of the few states in the U.S. to have a Constitutional amendment stipulating the people’s right to clean water. However, rising sea levels threaten to flood the state’s drinking water with a salt front.
The Delaware River Basin Commission is working hard to manage the river and prevent seawater from approaching its intakes — the structures that collect and channel water. As Carol Collier, former executive director of the DRBC, recently told Inside Climate News, “It should be an issue of concern for all of us.”
Millions of residents living in the areas of Philadelphia and southern New Jersey could see their drinking water contaminated with seawater if sea levels continue to rise, Inside Climate News reported.
The previous plan to stop salt water from entering the drinking water intakes — referred to as the Trenton flow objective — may not be enough to protect the supply if the seawater levels are not kept under control.
Rising sea levels threaten coastal cities and those who live in them. According to The Washington Post, in just the past decade, sea levels have risen faster than anticipated along the southern and southeastern coasts of the U.S — five inches total from 2010 to 2022.
Which is BS, not born out by actual gauges. The Philly station shows 1.03 feet per 100 years, and no acceleration. Damned sure not 5 inches in 12 years. They are making things up, and the WP article fails to provide any substantive science for that figure.
The scientific consensus is that human activity has exacerbated these conditions. Human-caused pollution — which sends far more carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases into the atmosphere than would naturally occur — has supercharged the problem. This has led to more frequent and more powerful weather events around the world that are triggered in some way by heat. One such example: hurricanes and the flooding they can cause.
And there it is: your fault. The seas are always going to rise during a Holocene warm period. Then you combine that with the land subsiding and older infrastructure, and, yes, you have a problem. Which we can solve with technology. Because it is not a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warm Period.
Finally, using renewable energy sources like solar and geothermal energy can help to reduce the heat-trapping pollution from gas-powered energy. All of these actions can add up to reinforce our drinking water systems and our communities.
OK, let’s switch Philly, a mostly Democrat city, to 100% renewables. Ban all fossil fueled vehicles. Shut down the airport. Shut down the sea ports. They’re good with that, right?
Read: Warmists Super Concerned Over Invisible Threat Or Something »
…is a fast rising sea because Other People won’t ride bikes instead of cars, you might just be a Warmist
The blog of the day is Not A Lot Of People Know That, with a post on a rich Warmist who wants to tax the wealthy (but not himself).
Read: If All You See… »
I know I could go back through the archives to show that growing pot is rather water intensive, uses a lot of energy, and can pollute from different pesticides and such. Of course, those mostly have nothing to do with the climate scam, but, environmental and infrustructre. Here’s the WP
Growing weed takes more energy than mining bitcoin. Can it go green?
In 2010, an energy researcher named Evan Mills was surprised to walk into a plant nursery near his Mendocino, California, home and find, among the seedlings and bags of soil, a display of gigantic 1,000-watt lightbulbs — a more powerful version of bulbs commonly used to light highways at night.
He asked the nursery owner what they were for. “He gave me kind of a side eye and then explained, ‘Well, this is for cannabis growing, you idiot. That’s what everyone around here does,’” Mills said.
The federal government rarely funds research on marijuana — a substance it officially ranks as more dangerous than fentanyl, cocaine and meth — let alone its energy use. So Mills, then a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spent nights and weekends outside of work on a years-long quest to build what many growers, regulators and researchers consider the most complete model of the energy it takes to power the American cannabis industry.
Wait, we’re actually paying people via the federal government to do research? You can’t tell me it was all on his dime.
What he found — after interviewing grow-light sellers, reading trade journals and equipment manuals, poring over crop-yields analyses and case studies of growers’ energy use, and scouring law enforcement reports — is that together, legal and illegal cannabis growers use about 1 percent of all American energy. That’s more than cryptocurrency mining or all other crops combined, according to a paper Mills published in February, an update to his original 2012 study.
OK, it’s 13 years later: why does the WP care? Don’t they have other things to write about?
The industry’s greenhouse pollution warms the planet about as much as 10 million cars do. For a daily user who buys cannabis grown indoors, their pot’s carbon footprint is nearly half the carbon footprint of their entire home, according to Mills.
“Consumers don’t know any of this,” he said. “They know that a car is labeled with how many miles per gallon it gets, or a refrigerator has an Energy Star label, but there’s zero consumer information about cannabis.”
Do consumers care? Heck, how many Warmists are getting high all the time? Are casual users, meaning they hit the vape pens all the time? Or gummies? Or something?
But the obvious solution is far from easy. Businesses are reluctant to give up indoor farms that can churn out six or more harvests a year with precise potency just to start over in outdoor fields that may only manage one or two harvests a year. Outdoor fields must also contend with weather and wild pollinators that make their product less predictable.
So, there must be solutions. In this incredibly long article, they do give some things that growers can do (which would cost money), before getting to
In 2014, two years after Colorado legalized marijuana, Boulder tacked a 2-cents-per-kilowatt-hour fee onto cannabis companies’ electricity bills. It used the money to hire energy efficiency consultants to suggest ways to save power and to buy energy monitoring equipment used to inspect grow houses. Later, growers that paid for upgrades got a break on their energy fees.
Damned if they do damned if they don’t.
“It’s another looming energy issue,” said Mills. “Cannabis right now is the dominant part. But if the proponents of indoor agriculture got their way, it would be overshadowed gradually by all these other crops.”
Obviously, the only solution is Government regulation.
Read: Washington Post Is Very Concerned To Know If Growing Marijuana Can Go Green »
Other than the hardcore Progressive and all the Elitists who might read Politico, everyone else is woopin’ and hollering in joy
‘DOGE and Musk were gonna have a big impact’: Federal job cuts shake the Capital Region
Political leaders across the Washington region are scrambling to find a place for government workers President Donald Trump is trying to fire, part of a mad dash to protect the region’s economy that relies on serving the federal workforce.
And most people see a localized economy that serves a massive bureaucracy as a big problem, and understand that this was never supposed to happen
Officials from the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia have been mobilizing their resources to build a safety net, trying to offer fired federal workers positions elsewhere. Websites sprawling with links on everything from filing for unemployment to postings for local jobs have gone up for all the major counties in the area, and officials are trying to hire as many former federal officials as they can in state and local government.
Which is where most government should reside, rather than in the isolated, insulated District Of Columbia and the surrounding towns.
The loss of jobs for potentially hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be devastating for the area’s future. The unemployment rate is inching up already in Washington, and the administration is exploring selling federal buildings in the city. The District’s budget projected as many as 40,000 fewer federal jobs, descending the city into a “mild recession” in 2026.
For most of America that sounds like a good thing
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser earlier this month announced the city would expedite the hiring process for federal workers looking to move to city government jobs. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore also unveiled an omnibus recruitment package, including virtual job fairs to siphon federal workers to the state’s growing education, biotechnology and cybersecurity sectors.
How many jobs does the city government really need? Can they afford to pay those big salaries? Does the state really need them?
And Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — a Republican and a backer of Trump who has thrown support behind DOGE — launched a “Virginia Has Jobs” campaign to promote the state, with his office noting many Virginians are “concerned about the impact of the federal workforce realignment on their careers.”
Virginia probably needs a bunch of people to work in the parks and road projects.
Departments and agencies are due to implement a widespread reduction in workforce in early April. Thousands of federal workers stand to join the already fired probationary employees and the other tens of thousands that accepted buyouts. But local leaders say they’re already preparing for the fallout.
The Elites didn’t care when it was workers who refused to take the worthless COVID vaccine.
Read: Politico Very Worried About D.C. Area With The Job Cuts »