You Can Deal With Your Climate Doom Blues By Delawning Or Something

By William Teach August 3, 2021 – 3:00 pm

Nothing like turning your property into an overgrown mess, lowering the property value (and those of your neighbors), to deal with your climate anxiety, eh? No worries about the cops or HOA stopping by enforce the rules

Got The Climate Change Blues? Try Delawning

I wasn’t surprised to see terms like “Climate Anxiety” and “Climate Despair” printed in the New York Times recently.

Just about every conversation with my peers and coworkers in the last five years has veered off into that territory, with millennials doing what we do best—snarking our way through the coming existential catastrophe. Maybe a desperate attempt to avoid the outcomes forecasted by those terms.

But making apocalyptic jokes about a crisis too big, too impersonal to wrap one’s head around is a matter of triage more than it is of care. It acknowledges the severity of the problem while still keeping it at a distance because of its perceived hopelessness. I knew that distance wasn’t doing me any favors.

In trying to remove that distance, my wife Eliza and I removed our lawn.

In doing that, we invited a little ecosystem into our lives, and made a small contribution to the resilience of our microclimate.

The front yard looks like the back. You know, an overgrown mess

The lawn is a curious thing. It’s a symbol of uniformity within a neighborhood; a space that is maintained for theoretical or occasional use; covered with an imported plant with shallow roots; tended with machines often powered by fossil fuels; fertilized and poisoned in alteration to give the appearance of vibrancy, but not too much. A way of having nature close at hand without having to get your hands very dirty.

But in smothering or removing grass, in growing food or allowing native perennial plants into even a small portion of a formerly manicured space, and in ceasing the application of pesticides, you get the opportunity to observe a complete ecosystem from the microbial level on up.

Or, you could get out in the woods and fields, get out in nature, rather than turning your yard into a mess.

By getting rid of your lawn, and replacing it with any number of trees, shrubs, native perennials, or food producing plants, you get that experience in full.

Does that look like a nice yard? Or an overgrown yard of a house being condemned? Meh, Warmists are nuts

And then imagine if one of your immediate neighbors did that? Then 10 of them? Then 30? Then, that every neighborhood you passed through during your day was host to its own bridges of green, its own vibrant ecosystem?

It starts with the space we have.

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If All You See…

By William Teach August 3, 2021 – 1:00 pm

…is an angry ocean from carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Flopping Aces, with a post on proof that mask mandates are utter nonsense.

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UK Guardian: The Olympics Are Rather Televisual Vomit

By William Teach August 3, 2021 – 10:30 am

It’s rather rare that I agree with the uber-leftist UK Guardian, which is a serious hotbed of Progressivism, particularly in the opinion section and climate cult stuff. In this case, they’re completely correct

NBC paid $7.75bn for its Olympic rights … and we got televisual vomit

If there’s one message the Olympics unfailingly conveys, it’s that elite competition is all about making the right choices. At a certain point every athlete needs to make the decision not to do certain things: the fencer lunging for the head rather than the body, the trampolinist starting their routine on the third jump instead of the fourth, the whitewater slalom all-rounder choosing to focus, early in their career, on the kayak over the canoe.

In 2014 NBC paid $7.75bn for the rights to broadcast the Olympics in the US until 2032. For these Olympics, faced with an inhospitable timezone for US viewers, the host broadcaster has taken the competing athletes’ message of elite discipline in the heat of battle, thrown it out the window, and instead tried to show a bit of everything to every viewer on every available platform all at once. Fitting perhaps for a tournament held in 2021 but still stuck with the previous year’s label, a frazzled atmosphere has suffused American coverage of Tokyo 2020.

From NBC proper to NBCSN, the USA channel, the Olympics channel, and the Golf channel, there has been no shortage of options for Olympics viewing on basic cable. But instead of sticking with single events throughout primetime – introducing them, highlighting the stakes and the protagonists, getting the viewer comfortable with the quirks of competition – NBC has deployed this vast arsenal of broadcast resources to spray America’s households with a kind of inescapable Olympic televisual vomit.

Televisual vomit. Ha!

Viewers have been able to see everything at any given moment (provided you have the Peacock streaming service) while understanding fundamentally nothing about what’s going on. NBC has never met a night of swimming finals that didn’t need to be spliced up with bizarre human interest segments on Caeleb Dressel’s first ride through the Florida wetlands on an airboat, or a routine on the double bars that couldn’t be improved by a quick jump to an ad break and some random highlights of Denmark and Indonesia in the badminton. We all want to know who the athletes are, of course, if only at a superficial level; and since the whole Olympics is so overwhelming, with so much going on at once, some measure of discombobulation from the host broadcaster is always understandable. But when we switch on the Olympics, I think it’s fair to say that most of us want to witness elite athletes perform spectacular feats with their bodies, not hear a series of driving stories about how they handle their daily commute.

I’ve been saying this for decades. It really goes back to when NBC had the Olympics and were doing their “rock and roll highlights” for the 1994 winter games. They spent more and more time on showing highlights, rather than the competitions, along with too much “human interest”. Couple that with so much of the 1994 winter games being pay-per-view, and it got bad. This continued on, and became worse as the years went on. They think people want to know every story of ever athlete. No, we want to watch the competitions, not snippets. We don’t need to hear how the athlete was motivated by someone saying something mean in the 3rd grade. Yes, some stories are great, and they can be told. Quickly. Then show the sports

This happens with other sports, BTW. Broadcasters think people are super interested. Most aren’t. Show us sports.

And US citizens aren’t particularly thrilled with having to pay for the Peacock streaming service when their tax dollars are paying for all the U.S. athletes to compete.

Read More »

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Say, What’s The Climate Cult “Degrowth” Movement?

By William Teach August 3, 2021 – 9:01 am

I’ve seen plenty of criticism over the years why I write something like “Warmists want to live like it’s 1499”, claiming that the climate cult doesn’t want to move backwards, they want to move forward. And that they are hardcore socialists, who want the economy to shrink, with the Government in control. The degrowth movement from the climate cult is out there, and it’s a lot bigger than Vox thinks

Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy?

Most of the world is very poor. Billions of people go hungry, can’t afford a doctor when they get sick, don’t have adequate shelter and sanitation, and struggle to exercise the freedoms essential to a good life because of material deprivation.

But for all the immiseration around us, one thing is undeniable: For the past several centuries — and especially for the past 70 years, since the end of World War II — the world has been getting much richer.

That economic boom means a lot of things. It means cancer treatments and neonatal intensive care units and smallpox vaccines and insulin. (snip)

But an increasingly wealthy world also means we eat more meat, mostly from factory-farmed animals. It means we emit lots more greenhouse gases. It means that consumers in developed countries buy a lot and throw away a lot.

In other words, it means a lot of good things and certainly some bad things as well.

They mean the climate crisis (scam)

But to a vocal slice of climate activists, that approach seems increasingly doomed. The degrowth movement, as it’s called, argues that humanity can’t keep growing without driving humanity into climate catastrophe. The only solution, the argument goes, is an extreme transformation of our way of life — a transition away from treating economic growth as a policy priority to an acceptance of shrinking GDP as a prerequisite to saving the planet.

At the core of degrowth is the climate crisis. Degrowth’s proponents argue that to save Earth, humans need to shrink global economic activity, because at our current levels of consumption, the world won’t hit the IPCC target of stabilizing global temperatures at no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. The degrowth movement argues that climate change should prompt a radical rethinking of economic growth, and policymakers serious about climate change should try to build a livable world without economic growth fueling it.

The degrowthers are generally Warmists who refuse to give up their own modern lifestyles, they just want others to be forced to do so.

It’s a bold, even romantic vision. But there are two problems with it: It doesn’t add up — and it would be nearly impossible to implement.

Addressing climate change will take genuinely radical changes to how our society works. Stirring as it might be to some, though, degrowth’s radicalism won’t fix the climate. Degrowth is most compelling as a personal ethos, a lens on your consumption habits, a way of life. What it’s not is a serious policy program to solve climate change, especially in a world where billions still live in poverty.

Of course, being Vox, it is a long, long article attempting to shoot down degrowth, but, it entirely misses the point, namely, that degrowth is a way for the Government to take full control of the economy, private entities, and people’s lives. It will dictate what people can buy (if they can afford it), where they can live and how big their home is, how much energy they can use, where, how, and when they can travel, what they can eat, where they can work, what kinds of businesses are allowed, and so much more.

One big problem with degrowth is this simple fact: In the coming decades, most carbon emissions won’t be coming from rich countries like the US — they’ll be happening in newly middle-income countries, like India, China, or Indonesia. Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes.

Even if emissions in rich countries go to zero very soon, climate change is set to worsen as poorer countries increase their own emissions.

And this is a big part of the degrowthers beliefs: that all those icky minorities in 3rd world nations should be stopped from developing. It’s a rather bigoted/racist position, but, then, the uber-white 1st World climate cultists have always been that way. They’re happy to let “minorities” into their countries, attempting to create voting blocks, as long as the “minorities” stay away in their own segregated communities.

Dear lord, this is a long piece. Skipping to the end

We don’t have very long, and we need to decarbonize quickly. We have technologies that have made a big difference already, and they must be made available on an unprecedented scale. We have more speculative solutions, technological and societal, and we should be prepared to try those, too. The scale of the problem is such that we need to act now — and we need to be clear-eyed about which ideas truly move the needle.

But, see, it’s all one movement, and the only way to accomplish stopping the climate crisis (scam) is with Government, because Warmists darn sure won’t practice what they preach.

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Surprise: US Citizens Are Skeptical Of Government Health Advice

By William Teach August 3, 2021 – 8:44 am

In other words, citizens have had enough of government dictating their lives, and even the NY Times has noticed

Americans Suffer Pandemic Whiplash as Leaders Struggle With Changing Virus

A week of public health reversals from the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left Americans with pandemic whiplash, sowing confusion about coronavirus vaccines and mask-wearing as the Delta variant upends what people thought they knew about how to stay safe.

Vaccines remain effective and highly protective against hospitalization and death, even among those infected with the extremely contagious Delta variant. Mask-wearing prevents transmission of the virus to those most at risk.

But the crisis President Biden once thought he had under control is changing shape faster than the country can adapt. An evolving virus, new scientific discoveries, deep ideological divides and 18 months of ever-changing pandemic messaging have left Americans skeptical of public health advice. So although the White House had promised a “summer of joy,” the nation is instead caught in a summer of confusion.

“While we desperately want to be done with this pandemic, Covid-19 is clearly not done with us, and so our battle must last a little longer,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., told reporters on Monday. “This is hard. This is heavy. But we are in this together.”

We are? If so, why are the big shots so contradictory on their actions? Why do they tell us masks work (the don’t. China Joe’s top COVID advisor said the don’t, Fauci said the don’t, and the numbers say they don’t)

Another administration official said Mr. Biden would address the nation later this week — the second time in less than a week — to reiterate and clarify his main takeaway points: The vaccines are safe and effective. The reason even vaccinated people have to mask up again is that so many people are unvaccinated. So go get your shots and tell your friends and neighbors to do the same.

He should just let people read the message off the teleprompter, because he’ll sound like his typical dementia self.

But Dr. del Rio said the C.D.C. made a misstep in May when it told vaccinated Americans they did not need to wear masks — not because the science behind the recommendation was wrong, but because the move led everyone to doff their masks and prompted states, localities and retail businesses to abandon their mask requirements, which enabled the Delta variant to flourish.

Wait, the science says that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks? This is all Pandemic Theater? You know what would help? Tell people to social distance, wash their hands, don’t touch their face. And distance. And don’t touch each other. Masks make people think they can get close. Thin pieces of cloth that do virtually nothing.

Biden mask flip-flop could flush vaccine progress ‘down the drain,’ officials fear

The Biden administration’s rollout of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control’s latest mask guidance split senior officials into rival camps: those who encourage new action as the situation changes versus those worried about undermining the vaccines.

Multiple Biden administration officials expressed frustration to the Washington Examiner about media coverage the new guidance received, arguing it “exacerbated” the political debate about health policy.

Two officials noted the administration remains concerned about the rise of the delta variant and breakthrough infections but added those same studies prove the “vaccines work.”

It’s a mess. Their messaging is a pure mess. And, in fairness, a lot more people got vaccinated, but, that seems to be a lot of people who are doing it to not lose their jobs.

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Senate “Infrastructure” Bill Mandates Anti-Drunk Driving Technology

By William Teach August 2, 2021 – 7:31 pm

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Of course, it won’t matter since most of us won’t be able to afford the electric vehicles Democrats also want

U.S. Senate bill seeks to require anti-drunk driving vehicle tech

A $1 trillion infrastructure bill under debate by the U.S. Senate includes a provision that directs U.S. regulators to mandate a passive technology to prevent intoxicated drivers from starting vehicles and avert more than 10,000 deaths annually.

For more than 15 years, automakers and others have studied potential technological fixes to address the roughly one-third of annual U.S. traffic deaths that involved impaired drivers. (snip)

Questions remain, however, whether the technology is accurate enough for widespread use and which one would be adopted.

In 2019, lawmakers told Reuters that automakers could use devices that would determine a driver’s blood alcohol level by their touching the steering wheel or engine start button, or could install sensors that would passively monitor a driver’s breath or eye-movements.

The bill would require the U.S. Transportation Department to set a technology safety standard within three years – and then give automakers at least another two years to comply – as long as new requirements are “reasonable, practicable, and appropriate.”

The bill said if regulators do not finalize new safety rules within 10 years, the department must report to Congress.

And how much would this add to the price of a vehicle? How intrusive would it be? Would the car report back to law enforcement with tracking data? Or simply be disabled? What if there’s false readings shutting it down while driving? Yes, it’s good to keep the drunks and drugged off the roads. What’s the catch? There’s always a catch.

Remember when Obama jacked up the CAFE standards, and then, when gas taxes dropped due to much better fuel economy they wanted to implement a road user fee, as well as extra taxes on hybrids and the small number of EVs? There are quite a few crazy things in the bill.

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Say, How Do We Get Buy-In For Net Zero Or Something

By William Teach August 2, 2021 – 3:00 pm

By “buy-in”, the article means “how does government force this on citizens?”

How do we get public buy-in for net zero?

There are warning signs in relation to popular consent for the ‘net zero’ project. And we don’t need particularly long memories to recall the risks of there being two parallel national conversations about an important issue based on very different views. As with Brexit, certain politicians stand ready to exploit opposition to climate change just at the time when we start to get to the pointy end of reducing emissions, when the less visible actions have largely been carried out, and people will start to have to make more far reaching changes to their daily lives.

Carbon pricing is a potential flash point. We have many different carbon pricing instruments already in the UK – the Emissions Trading Scheme, Road Fuel Duty, the Climate Change Levy to name just some, but they are either very well established, or largely invisible to consumers. On the one hand environmentalists would argue that they are neither high enough, comprehensive enough, or straightforward enough. On the other, suggestions of applying carbon pricing to domestic gas or to meat produce outrage.

In this context I suggest 3 steps to help build consent for the harder next steps which are to come.

  1. Use carbon pricing where it ‘works’ (to reduce emissions) rather than where it just ‘hurts’.
  2. Target a carbon dividend where it is deserved and where you get ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of a reaction. This means focusing it on the young who are those who will lose out most from climate change.
  3. Give everyone an immediate financial stake in the net zero project – a small income from the state calculated as a share of that part of the economy which is long term sustainable and which will build in a measurable way as the transformation, of which they are part, takes place.

This is more realistic (and ultimately better) than more ambitious, but politically and economically unfeasible schemes such as a high pan-economy carbon tax or a universal basic income.

So, basically slap citizens with a government driven carbon pricing scheme, then give them so cash as a bribe to ignore how much their cost of living has gone up. How does any of this create public buy-in? Or, by public, does Kevin Langford mean “government buy-in?” Because, he really doesn’t truly explain how any of this gets buy-in from citizens, including those young folks who will be hit with carbon dividends. If people really cared about this in practice, rather than theory, they’d be doing it on their own.

We are looking to build an economy and a society which is sustainable.  We want everyone to buy into that. An oft reported comment in the Brexit context – that’s your GDP, not ours – illustrates how many people don’t really buy in; for many it’s not ‘our’ GDP – and its not ‘our’ net zero either. How do we tackle this?  Let’s agree a measure of our economic progress towards a green economy – call it sustainable GDP. And then distribute – from tax revenues – a small share to every working age adult in the country.  This makes progress apparent now – in a way which avoiding a catastrophe at some point in the future isn’t.

What’s this “we”? Why don’t these people go off and do it in little communities, show us how it works? Live the carbon neutral net zero life. Leave the rest of us out of their cult.

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If All You See…

By William Teach August 2, 2021 – 1:00 pm

…is an evil fossil fueled vehicle turning the world to desert, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is American Greatness, with a post digging into the 2,700 porkfest infrastructure bill.

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Bummer: US Women’s Soccer Protest Team Loses

By William Teach August 2, 2021 – 10:30 am

I really don’t feel bad having rooted against Megan Rapinoe and the rest of her America hating comrades: they don’t like the U.S., so, they don’t deserve support

USWNT’s dreams of Olympic gold dashed in listless 1-0 semifinal loss to Canada

The U.S. women’s national team crashed out of its chase for Olympic gold with a dud of a 1-0 loss to Canada here on Monday, a fitting end to a pursuit in which the most dominant soccer team in the world never hit top gear.

Officially, the Americans will play for bronze on Friday because of a 75th-minute penalty, conceded by Tierna Davidson for a foul on Deanne Rose, awarded after a video review. Canada’s Jessie Fleming converted it. Backup U.S. goalkeeper Adrianna Franch just barely couldn’t save it.

But really, the Americans fell short of the final because they were poor, throughout the Games and here on a sleepy, sticky-hot evening at the Ibaraki Kashima Stadium. They had no rhythm. No composure. No verve.

Instead, there were errant passes. Sloppy touches. Fatigue. Frustration. And a first loss to Canada since 2001.

“Sucks,” Megan Rapinoe said, in response to a question about what was going through her head at final whistle. “Really sh—y.”

Yeah, well, maybe they should have spent more time practicing and getting their heads right rather than worrying about what kinds of things they were going to do show their hatred of the U.S.

Also

Totally looks like a woman, right?

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Infrastructure Bill Includes State Mandated Carbon Reduction Programs

By William Teach August 2, 2021 – 7:05 am

The s0-called infrastructure bill was leaked, and it’s a whopping 2,700 pages.

Sources familiar with the drafting of the text of this bill told Breitbart News it was being written in secret for months outside the normal legislative process, which is supposed to happen in relevant committees of jurisdiction. These sources made the unauthorized leak of the draft text to Breitbart News out of concern that the murky and secretive process behind this bill may have led to widespread corruption throughout its nearly three thousand pages.

The bill itself was finally released at 945pm last night. And includes tons of shady stuff. And stuff that isn’t really infrastructure. And tons of left wing crazy. And

‘Infrastructure’ Bill Caters to ‘Climate Change’ with State-Mandated Carbon Reduction Programs

Obscured in more than 2,700 pages of the U.S. Senate’s so-called bipartisan “infrastructure” bill is a plan for state-mandated carbon reduction programs.

The text, which Breitbart News exclusively obtained from U.S. Senate sources not authorized to leak it, details how the federal government would mandate states to craft “Green New Deal”-style programs in partnership with local metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to fight “climate change.”

“A state, in consultation with any metropolitan planning organization designated within the state, shall develop a carbon reduction strategy,” according to the text, which is also in the officially released version of the bill. [Emphasis added]

The federal government oversees metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which are designated by agreement between the governor and local governments and represent localities in all urbanized areas (UZAs) with populations over 50,000, as determined by the U.S. Census, according to the Federal Transit Administration. There are at least 420 MPOs in the United States, the National Association of Regional Councils estimated.

No later than two years after the bill’s enactment, states would have to present their carbon reduction programs for approval to the secretary of transportation. The proposed strategies must meet several requirements to be considered “green” enough.

A clear violation of the 10th Amendment. Another massive federal government over-reach, as they like to do, forcing state and local governments to be responsive to the feds, undercutting their Constitutional authority and sovereignty.

Requirements include but are not limited to:

  • Reducing traffic congestion by disincentivizing single-occupant vehicle trips and facilitating “the use of alternatives” like public transportation, shared or pooled vehicle trips, “pedestrian facilities,” and “bicycle facilities” within the state.
  • Facilitating the use of vehicles or modes of travel that result in “lower transportation emissions per person-mile traveled as compared to existing vehicles.”
  • Incentivizing the construction of vehicles that emit less carbon.

Every Republican senator needs to vote against this crap bill, and try and turn Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema against it. It will generate massive and immediate lawsuits if passed, for the climate portion and many others. And you can bet that Republican run states will ignore this 100%.

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Posted in AGW Socialism, Global Warming, Government | 11 Comments | Trackback URL
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