When sea levels rise because of global warming

Timelapse of the devastating sea-level rise from climate change (1980-2024): pic.twitter.com/kCNKBy2xvo

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 29, 2024

Biden Killed The Israel-Europe EastMed Gas Pipeline, How’s That Looking Now?

 

Why is the U.S. continuing to pursue a policy that strengthens Russia and weakens our allies?

Is Biden Putin's puppet? 

Joseph Biden intended his presidency to be about tackling the climate crisis – his most urgent priority after containing Covid-19. On his very first day in office, President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline project, which was to carry millions of gallons of oil from Canada to refineries in the United States. The executive order canceling Keystone also revoked oil and gas development at national wildlife monuments.

A few months later, Biden lifted sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline planned to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany, and ultimately approved it. Previous administrations opposed it as increasing German dependence on Russia and letting Russia deprive Ukraine of revenue by circumventing existing gas-transit networks. As of 2020, Russia supplied roughly 65% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 40% of European Union imported gas. Italy, which imports some 90% of its gas, is also heavily dependent on Russia.

Finally, citing environmental concerns, Biden withdrew support for the EastMed Pipeline in January 2022. According to an accord between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus, the underwater pipeline was planned to stretch 1,180 miles across the Mediterranean Sea, connecting Israeli gas to Cyprus and Greece, and on to Italy. It was expected to cost about $7 billion, and would have carried 10 billion cubic meters of gas a year initially, with the possibility of eventually doubling capacity. Biden’s withdrawal killed the project for practical purposes.

The True Face of the North Face

 

It started with a nice gesture. Adam Anderson, the CEO of Innovex Downhole Solutions, wanted to buy his employees a Christmas gift. So he ordered 400 North Face jackets and asked that their corporate logo be included.

Then came the bad news. The North Face company would sell Innovex the jackets but wouldn't include the energy company's logo. The reason? Innovex was an oil and gas company, and it would be a bad thing for North Face's public image to associate itself with the industry.

Not happy with that answer, Anderson struck back with some public relations of his own. It turns out the vast majority of North Face's apparel—its hoodies, snow pants, coats and many other items in its product line, like backpacks and tents—are made with polyester, polyurethane and nylon, all of which come from petroleum. Even its fancy fleece jackets are made of polyester.

 

The North Face is the new king of environmental hypocrisy

The North Face has managed to make millions by billing itself as an environmentally conscious eco-friendly company. It even went so far as to refuse to sell clothes to a small business in the oil and gas industry. In reality, however, its business is predicated on selling clothes, shoes, and outdoor gear made of petroleum-based synthetic materials and then shipping those products around the world on fuel-guzzling ships and airplanes.

Earlier this month, it turned into the Grinch for Innovex Downhole Solutions, a West Texas oil- and gas-well developer. Innovex wanted to buy 400 North Face jackets customized with the company’s logo as a Christmas present for its employees. The North Face, however, would not sell the jackets to the small business, even though Innovex had previously purchased clothing directly from the company in the past without issue.

The outdoor-clothing giant claimed Innovex did not meet the clothing maker’s brand standards.

“North Face would not sell us the jackets because we [are] an oil and gas company,” wrote Innovex CEO Adam Anderson in an open letter to The North Face’s parent company, VF Corporation.

As Anderson points out in his letter, “The irony … is your jackets are made from the oil and gas products the hardworking men and women of our energy produce.”

The North Face, like most clothing makers, depends on fossil fuels. About two-thirds of clothing is made from synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels. The use of synthetic fibers has doubled over the past 20 years, and synthetics are particularly popular in recreational gear such as that made by The North Face.

But The North Face’s environmental hypocrisy goes far beyond peddling pricey parkas, hiking boots, and backpacks that happen to be made largely of the very materials whose extraction it publicly opposes.

As Four Alleged Arson Suspects are Arrested for Wildfires, Media Fans the Flames of Climate Change

 California is a tinderbox and arsonists are lighting fires.  Meanwhile, the governor is blaming global warming.  

The following was written two years ago and remains true today.  Of course, radicals starting fires and politicians blaming global warming to deflect from their own culpability is why California is in the condition it's now in.

▪ Access: There has long been a push to block access and create wilderness areas. This makes access more difficult during emergencies. This stops firewood scavenging in the national forests. Firewood collection creates mini fuel breaks along any open forest road. Only dead and down trees are legal to collect.

▪ Logging: If we never logged and we allowed the natural fire cycle to occur, we wouldn’t have to log now. Over the last century, we prevented the natural fire cycle. This wasn’t a problem until recently because logging thinned the forest as fire used to. Logging died at the hands of the misguided environmentalists in this state over the last 30-40 years. Fuels have accumulated. Logging thins forests and prevents wildfires from becoming catastrophic.

▪ Grazing: Grazing has been opposed for many suspect environmental reasons. Grazing thins brush. Grass fires are easy to fight and stay small. Brush fires are hard to fight and grow large quickly. In this way fire climbs to larger and larger fuels until it races through the crowns of the trees, leaving behind something eerily reminiscent of a nuclear blast.

▪ Endangered species: The constant “discovery” of “subspecies” by scientists whose funding and careers depend on finding them is dubious at best. Often good management practices are halted at the order of a court when one of the “subspecies” is “discovered” on a parcel of land.

▪ Water quality: Water quality is frequently used to halt grazing, logging, access, and other effective management tools.

▪ Air pollution: Air districts have a narrow window of air quality in which controlled burns are allowed. It would be much better to allow a little more air pollution from controlled burns then to wait for massive wildfires with extreme air quality problems.

Recycling: another idea that isn’t going quite as planned

I never thought that recycling was a good idea. The cost of recycling, the energy used to recycle, always seemed to me to result in a net negative for the environment. But it sounded good and people fell for it.  

Now the Chinese have decided to stop buying our trash.

“Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits,” wrote John Tierney in a must-read 2015 op-ed for The New York Times

Here’s How Wrong Past Environmental Predictions Have Been

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies.

In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”

He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Read the whole thing.

Let me tell you what science is. It is research into nature. In chemistry, my specialty, it's the ability to combine elements and molecules to produce a new compound. It could be new and unique or it could be a repeat of an old experiment. But if it's done right it will always get the same result. A chemist will predicts that if you combine A and B under stated conditions you will always get C. If his prediction does not come true he will change his mind and admit that he failed. In the so-called "science" of global warming predictions have proven to be totally and utterly wrong. However the fake "scientists" get more money and their past failures are ignored. Instead they get prizes and awards.

YOUR CHOICE: A GREEN AMERICA OR A BROWN AMERICA

Ann Coulter uses the Wayback Machine to tell us how the Sierra Club sold it's soul $100 million.

Who knew that they had a soul to sell?

In celebration of Earth Day this Saturday, let's review how the Sierra Club sold its soul and screwed the Earth for a $100 million donation. They must hate themselves for it, so why shouldn't we hate them, too?

After Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act began dumping millions of Third-Worlders on the country, the Sierra Club talked of little else besides reducing immigration.

The Flint Water Crisis Is the Result of a Stimulus Project Gone Wrong

Interesting anaysis:

Liberals are wrongly blaming Flint's lead poisoning crisis on austerity measures imposed on the city by a fiscallyconservative Republican Governor Rick Snyder, as I wrote last week. (Snyder had appointed an emergency manager in 2011 to help the city balance its books and avoid bankruptcy.) However, I didn't quite realize just how wrong they were. As it turns out, the debacle is the result of Snyder's efforts to stimulate the local economy—the exact opposite of the liberal line.

The whole mess occurred because Flint decided against renewing its 30-year contract with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) and switched instead to Karengondi Water Authority (KWA). KWA was planning to build its own hugely expensive pipeline, parallel to DWSD's, to harness water from Lake Huron and service the Genesee County area where Flint is located. This left the city in the lurch for a few years when its contract with DWSD ended but the new facility had not yet gone online, prompting it to reopen a local mothballed facility that relied on the toxic Flint River as its source (more on the rank stupidity of this decision later).

The rationale for the original decision to switch Flint's water providers was that, in the long run, KWA would generate substantial savings for the cash-strapped city. Not only was this false but Snyder had very good reasons at that time to believe that this was false.

Read the whole thing.

Seven Big Failed Environmentalist Predictions

Over at The Federalist we are reminded that the environmental doomsayers have been spectacularly wrong too many times to be readily believed.  Here are a few excerpts, read the whole thing.

1) Global Cooling
A list like this has to start with the “climate change” catastrophe the environmentalists were all warning about in the 1970s: global cooling and a descent into a new ice age. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

As late as 1980, Carl Sagan was still presenting global cooling as one of two possible doomsday scenarios we could choose from.

2) Overpopulation
When environmentalists said that we were destroying the Earth, they meant it directly and literally. The biggest problem was the very existence of humans, the fact that there were just too darned many of us. We were going to keep growing unchecked, and we were going to swarm the surface of the Earth like locusts, destroying everything in our path until we eventually used it all up.

There were going to be an inconceivable seven billion people on Earth by the year 2000, and there was just no way we could support them all.

3) Mass Starvation
Predictions of global famine were part of the population growth hysteria, but they were such a big part that they deserve their own separate treatment.

My favorite failed prediction is this one, from Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.

4) Resource Depletion
In addition to running out of food, we were also supposed to run out of natural resources, such as nickel and copper, and above all we were running out of oil.

Here’s our friend Kenneth Watt again, with his present trends continuing: “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

5) Mass Extinction
At the first Earth Day, its political sponsor, Senator Gaylord Nelson, warned: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

6) Renewable Energy
This isn’t a prediction about a disaster that didn’t happen. It’s a prediction about a solution that never materialized. Don’t worry about the fact that we want to shut down fossil fuels and dirty coal, we were told, because there’s a bright new future from “Renewable Energy.”

But all of the alternatives we were promised fall into two categories. There are those that are still too unreliable and expensive; Germany is about to be crushed by the massive cost of its renewable energy boondoggle. And then there are those which have gone from being the alternative championed by environmentalists to being the targets of the environmentalist anger. This is by far the most common trajectory. [Shale oil, hydroelectric, wind farms] Now, even large-scale solar energy is under attack. And I’m still waiting for environmentalists to figure out exactly what goes in to those solar panels.

7) Global Warming
Which brings us back to global warming. I noted last week that after a multi-decade plateau in global temperatures, they are now at or below the low end of the range for all of the computer models that predicted global warming.

If we go full circle, back to the failed prediction of global cooling, we can see the wider trend. After two or three decades of cooling temperatures, from the 1940s to 1970, environmentalists project a cooling trend—only to have the climate change on them. After a few decades of warmer temperatures, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, they all jumped onto the bandwagon of projecting a continued warming trend—and the darned climate changed again, staying roughly flat since about 1998.

But by now you can get an idea for the major outlines of an environmental hysteria. The steps are: a) start with assumption that man is “ravaging the Earth,” b) latch onto an unproven scientific hypothesis that fits this preconception, c) extrapolate wildly from half-formed theories and short-term trends to predict a future apocalypse, d) pressure a bunch of people with “Ph.D.” after their names to endorse it so you can say it’s a consensus of experts, e) get the press to broadcast it with even less nuance and get a bunch of Hollywood celebrities who failed Freshman biology to adopt it as their pet cause, then finally f) quietly drop the whole thing when it doesn’t pan out—and move on with undiminished enthusiasm to the next environmental doomsday scenario.

When men fail as entirely as they have—well, I’m not going to ask them to fall on their swords. But we might ask them to understand why, when they assure us their newest doomsday predictions are really, really true this time, we’re not inclined to believe a single word they say.

Liberal calls for attack on Israel

I think it was Yogi Berra who said that "you can observe a lot by just watching."   With that I found out that some Liberals are seriously thinking that a nuclear attack on Israel by, among others, France, should be under consideration. 

I was reading Netanyahu’s Victory, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal when I ran across this gem by a commenter named Marc Jones:

Here is something for you to consider Mr. Perlman. There are a number of nuclear states which are dependent on Middle East oil. They include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and France. There are several other states which have all the components and capabilities to construct nuclear weapons very quickly, that are also dependent on Middle East oil. They include Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, and South Korea. Do you really think they will allow their economies to be wrecked by a conflict between Iran and Israel? Is it Israel or Iran who's elimination would lead to greater stability for their economies? It is not just Israel that can be expected to act in its own best interests. Israelis should spend some time pondering that fact.

When someone pointed out that if Israel believed that nuclear armed nations could decide to destroy  Israel to protect Arab oil it would be a very good reason for them to attack Iran first, Marc Jones said this:

...you are off by a full 180 degrees regarding my scenario. Let me be more clear. A first [sic] against Iran by Israel is a recipe for disaster. They don't have sufficient convention capability to eliminate the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. If they decide to use their nukes, it is quite likely they will face a pre-emptive first strike by any of a number of nuclear powers dependent on Mid-east oil. Charging into a box canyon, guns blazing is generally a very bad idea and that would be exactly what a first strike would entail. The result could be existential tragedy for Israel, a truly God-awful outcome.

He decides to double down in a follow-up:

Nations act in their own best interests. Think about that. What is in the best interests of those countries? Israeli security? Not by any stretch of imagination. They will protect their own economies.

...all of the countries listed have active and effective foreign intelligence services. Several have extensive spy satellite systems. If they think events in the Middle East are beginning to risk their wellbeing, they will be watching. If they see Israel making pre-launch preparations and it makes sense to do so, they will act.

Marc Jones sees an attack, not by Arabs, but by nations depending on Mid-East oil as a real possibility.  

Outrageous? 

Perhaps. But we once thought that an American president ruling by decree executive order was outrageous.  We once thought that free speech was sacrosanct, especially on college campuses.  We once thought that we could buy a cup of coffee without getting lectured on race.  We once thought that how long you showered was none of the government's business.  We once thought that helping Israel - the only democracy in the Middle East - defend itself was as American as apple pie.  It helps to observe what the Left is thinking in its unguarded moments, because their agenda is on the march.  And nuking Israel to protect access to Arab oil is definitely on their radar screen. 

Billionaire Trying to Force Costly Green Mandate on New York

Billionaire John Catsimatidis is working to slip a biofuel mandate that would add $150 million to New Yorkers’ heat expenses into the state budget just as a company he owns completes construction of the largest biofuel plant in the region.

Can you say "Crony Capitalism?"  Culture of Corruption?  Big, fat contributor to Democrats.

Democrat Allison Grimes Lies about Kentuck Coal.

The Little Eichmanns in the Global Warming Community collect another scalp

The Little Eichmanns include the editorial board of the Virginian Pilot who never fail to tell us that Norfolk is in imminent danger of being swallowed up by the sea.  They also tell us that global warming is settled science and scoff at anyone who questions their orthodoxy.

Actually they and their ilk do a  lot more than scoff.  They threaten the life, the reputations and the livelihood of anyone who disagrees.  

It was once assumed that the threats, the rejection of tenure, the withdrawal of government grants and the hatred of the EnviroNazis only really persuaded the younger academics to string along.  But we were wrong.  The Virginian Pilot's pals in academia managed to cow a 79-year old Professor, Lennart Bengtsson, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, winner of the 2005 Descartes Research Prize and the 2006 World Meteorological Organization IMO Prize. It seems his crime was to join a group that questions the global warming orthodoxy. Said Bengtsson:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety.

Keep that in mind when you read anything in the Virginian Pilot, not just about global warming, the imminent inundation of Norfolk or anything else. These people are vicious.   And you won't read about this in the Virginian Pilot.  

Who is Tom Steyer?

We need to find out because Tom Steyer  has announced that he is going to spend $100 million dollars to promote green energy.  How is he going to do this?  By supporting Democrats.  He is often simply identified by his supporters as a billionaire and a hedge fund manager.  Is that all?  What's under the blanket?

It seems that he's not acting from altruistic motives.

Exhibit A:

“Tom Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund manager with major investments in renewable energy, is promoting a $1.1 billion tax on out of state businesses with operations in California to fund renewable energy projects.

Exhibit B:

It is Obama bundler, hedge fund manager, and Center for American Progress board member Tom Steyer’s Farallon Capital Management that is selling LightSquared’s debt to investors such as Carl Icahn. So I suppose one cannot say that LightSquared has been a total waste for Obama’s pals.

Exhibit C:

Steyer, "Is reportedly one of the backers of Greener Capital, which invests in alternative fuel companies that benefit from the anti-oil policies of the Obama administration. Steyer is also the founder and senior managing partner of Farallon Capital Management, which stands to profit from government policies that increase consumption of natural gas."

The Beacon goes on to give more interesting tidbits about Steyer being a Goldman Sachs protegé of Robert Rubin, but what caught my attention is that while Mr. Styers' alternative energy investments are quite impressive, he also "owns millions of dollars worth of shares in Big Oil companies such as BP."

Exhibit D:

In January of this year Steyer coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with John Podesta, “We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas,” that supported Obama’s decision not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and argued for extending “clean-energy programs like the Production Tax Credit” and reviving “the Manufacturing Tax Credit, which helps factories retool for the clean-tech sector.” The authors failed to disclose that Steyer helps pay Podesta’s salary and that his investments would net millions if the federal government shaped public policy to his liking—millions of dollars that then would be funneled back into institutions like CAP and Democratic campaigns like Obama’s.

Exhibit E:  

Tom Steyer, a billionaire investor who has raised at least $50,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign, will speak about energy policy as it relates to the president’s vision of “an economy built to last,” which includes his plan to “double down” on taxpayer-backed green energy investments.

Such a doubling down would benefit Steyer, who is reportedly one of the backers of Greener Capital, which invests in alternative fuel companies that benefit from the anti-oil policies of the Obama administration.

Steyer is also the founder and senior managing partner of Farallon Capital Management, a $20 billion hedge fund that ranks as one of the largest of its kind in the world.

Farallon stands to profit from government policies that increase consumption of natural gas. Farallon owns nearly $14 million worth of shares of Westport Innovations, the self-described ”global leader in natural gas engines.” The Westport Carbon Project (WCP), according to its website, ”was established to monetize the carbon emission reductions associated with the Westport HD engine, the Cummins Westport ISL G and other natural gas engines developed with our OEM partners. The WCP enables customers to earn annual carbon rebate cheques for the natural gas vehicles in their fleet as of January 1, 2010.”

Farallon also owns more than $8 million worth of shares of Fuel Systems Solutions, which according to its website ”designs, manufactures and supplies proven, cost-effective alternative fuel components and systems for transportation and industrial applications. Its gaseous fuel technology for propane (LPG) and natural gas (CNG) generates savings, reduces emissions, and promotes energy independence.”

Exhibit F:

[After listing the financial interest Steyer has in making traditional energy more expensive]Steyer calling traditional energy companies “self-interested” is like the presumed morally superior pot calling the proven economically superior kettle black. Perhaps he really is a “true believer.” If so, he should remove himself from any form of financial gain he can reap from his political activism and donations.

Exhibit G:

His 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed making the case for natural gas was coauthored with Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire who is quickly becoming one of the most powerful men in the Democratic Party. Steyer is known mainly for his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, and for his recent pledge to raise and spend $100 million on behalf of Democrats in this year’s elections. According to Reid Wilson, liberal donors such as Steyer “aren’t going to realize a profit if their chosen candidates win.” This is not true.

Steyer pledged to remove himself from the operations of his hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management, in the waning days of 2012, when he was being considered as a possible secretary of Energy in the second Obama administration. But he remains an “outside limited partner” with the firm, and the “bulk” of his billion-dollar fortune is parked there. As of 2012, when Steyer was supporting Democrats, donating millions to Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and otherwise championing natural gas over other forms of energy, Farallon held more than $7 million in shares of gas technology company Fuel Systems Solutions. He was making plenty of money from the Obama administration’s championing of natural gas.

As of the end of 2013, Farallon also held close to $40 million in Kinder Morgan, which is building a competitor to the Keystone Pipeline. When Farallon’s position in Kinder Morgan was exposed last summer—after the Keystone debate had been raging for years—Steyer pledged to sell his share of the stock and donate the profits to charity. Last September, it was revealed that Steyer had backed a UT study on hydraulic fracturing, which showed that the process does not result in dangerous methane emissions. As far as I can determine, Steyer remains an adviser to and backer of EFW Partners, a “global investor in the basic resources critical for economic growth: energy, food, and water.” I wonder whether EFW is short or long on LNG.

Exhibit H:

In September 2012, the Washington Free Beacon documented that Steyer "is reportedly one of the backers of Greener Capital, which invests in alternative fuel companies that benefit from the anti-oil policies of the Obama administration." What's key to this Green Corruption file is that "Steyer has donated at least $1.4 million to the Center for American Progress (CAP) since 2009 through his TomKat Charitable Trust. As of 2010, he was listed as a director of the left-wing think tank."

In December 2013, The Beacon, in their piece "Keystone to the Kingdom," we find a stunning look at the relationship between Mr. Steyer and John Podesta: "Steyer is on the board of the Center for American Progress, and in the early months of 2012 he and Podesta cosigned a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas,” arguing against Keystone and for tax loopholes such as the Production Tax Credit, increasing the value of the green energy companies in which Steyer invested and on whose boards Podesta sat."

Moreover, while a slew of Democrats who oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, stand to benefit from its rejection, Farallon Capital Management "has extensive holdings in fossil fuel companies — including investments that could benefit from the blocking of the Keystone pipeline," reported The Daily Caller in May 2013. One in particular stands out: "Farallon also still holds stock in BP" –– the oil giant that according to POLITICO in 2010, Obama was the biggest recipient of BP donations over the past twenty years."

Steyer is an "environmentalist" the same way Warren Buffett is a candy maker. Steyer is investing million sin Democrat politicians who will help his "green" energy firms make billions from government contracts, from government subsidies and from the government squeezing traditional energy sources. The end result of this Crony Capitalism - or to put it more simply: corruption - is that the people get poorer while the well connected get rich at your expense. Meanwhile the press, who would scream bloody murder if it were a conservative pulling off this crime, are covering up for Steyer, calling him an "environmentalist" rather than a rent-seeking crook.

You will not, for instance find this information in the NY Times or Washington Post who are writing laudatory articles about this benevolent billionaire.  What they won't tell you either is that they are literally sleeping with Steyer supporters.

So we have a contrast that couldn’t be clearer: the Washington Post published a false story about support for Keystone because it fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. It covered up a similar, but true story about opposition to the pipeline (and about “green” politics in general) because that, too, fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. I don’t think we need to look any further to connect the dots.

And yet, a still deeper level of corruption is on display here. Juliet Eilperin is a reporter for the Washington Post who covers, among other things, environmental politics. As I wrote in my prior post, she is married to Andrew Light. Light writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress, a far-left organization that has carried on a years-long vendetta against Charles and David Koch on its web site, Think Progress. Light is also a member of the Obama administration, as Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the Department of State. The Center for American Progress is headed by John Podesta, who chaired Barack Obama’s transition team and is now listed as a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. Note that Ms. Eilperin quoted Podesta, her husband’s boss, in her puff piece on Tom Steyer.

Oh, yes–one more thing. Guess who sits on the board of the Center for American Progress? Yup. Tom Steyer.

This kind of incest is common in Washington. You can’t separate the reporters from the activists from the Obama administration officials from the billionaire cronies. Often, as in this instance, the same people wear two or more of those hats simultaneously. However bad you think the corruption and cronyism in Washington are, they are worse than you imagine. And if you think the Washington Post is part of a free and independent press, think again.

Merkel Sees Biggest Victory Since Kohl’s Reunification Vote

Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc took 41.8 percent in today’s election to 25.5 percent for the Social Democrats of Peer Steinbrueck, projections on ZDF television as of 8:57 p.m. showed.

Most of the Leftist parties were under 10%.

The Greens, with which the SPD governed from 1998 to 2005, took 8.4 percent, and the anti-capitalist Left Party got 8.5 percent, according to the projections. The anti-euro Alternative for Germany had 4.8 percent.

The largest rival to Merkel's Christian Democrats is the Social Democrats (SPD) which got 25.5% of the vote. The Free Democrats received 4.7% of the vote, below the 5% needed to win seats in the parliament.

Taking a page from Michelle Obama's book, the Greens decided that it would be a good idea to propose that public cafeterias go meat-free on a designated "Veggie Day" each week in order to help the environment and reduce cruelty to animals.

Earlier this year, the Greens were polling consistently in the double digits, often around 15% to 16%. However, since the "Veggie Day" story broke in August, the party's following has dropped to as low as 9% in some polls.

It appears that the Veggie platform was so badly received that the Greens did worse than their worst expectations.

The horrible, terrible, deadly danger of coating yourself in banana pudding

You knew that bananas are radioactive didn't you?  The delicious yellow fruit looks so innocent sitting in the produce section of the supermarket ... is full of radioactivity!  It's a killer fruit.  And that granite countertop that you installed?  Radioactive!  If you're not careful, if you stacked bananas on your granite countertop you may set off a nuclear explosion that could devastate half your state.  That is, if you believe the people who write for the press.

That was the subject of an article in PJ Media by Charlie Martin about this rather sensational story from Natural News: 

Japan’s nuclear watchdog has now declared the leak of radioactive water from Fukushima a “state of emergency.” Each day, 300 tons of radioactive water seeps into the ocean, and it’s now clear that TEPCO has engage [sic] in a two-and-a-half-year cover-up of immense magnitude.

Just how out of control is the situation at Fukushima? It’s so out of control that TEPCO recently had to admit 10 of its workers were somehow — yeah, see if you can figure this out — sprayed with highly radioactive water while waiting for a bus.

“The workers’ exposure above the neck was found to be as much as 10 becquerels per square centimeter,” reports Bloomberg.com

How exactly did highly radioactive water manage to find its way to a bus stop in the first place?

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Will these workers live? Do you know what a Becquerel (Bq) is?

I'll let Charlie Martin explain. He explains it in terms of those radioactive bananas (read the whole thing for the details).

Since you went back and re-read that 2011 post when I linked it (you didn’t? But what if there’s a quiz?) you’ll recall that there is a somewhat-joking unit called the banana equivalent. Bananas, like everything else, are slightly radioactive by nature, and in fact it turns out that since bananas concentrate potassium, they’re a little more radioactive than a lot of other things. So, a banana equivalent amount of radioactivity is something that has about the same number of decays per second as a banana does. So what’s the banana-equivalent in Bq?

A normal-sized 150g banana produces about 20 Bq.

So, the “highly radioactive water”? It’s roughly equivalent in radiation danger to coating yourself in banana pudding.

As an aside, the Virginian Pilot has been telling us all the horrible, terrible, deadly, disastrous thing that could happen to us if mining for uranium were allowed in Virginia.  The next time they write one of their hysterical editorials, I'm going to ask them how many bananas would equal the destructive power of an accident at a uranium mine.  

New York may seek to reduce power for 3rd straight day

Biggest city in US joins the Third World.

New York State's power grid operator said it might ask some of its customers in its power reduction programs to limit electricity use for a third day as people crank up air conditioners to escape the brutal heat wave.

All the while the EPA and Team Obama demand the end of coal fired power plants.

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in the USA

H/T Instapundit

Frankly, I had no idea that there were 14,000 wind turbines in the US, much less that there were 14,000 abandoned ones.

The US has had wind farms since 1981, what the left and the green movement don't want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the truth. The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. That's the part liberals forget: making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil, and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.

There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people's lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape. The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it's too cold or the wind speed is too high.

The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.

Thousands of these abandoned monsters pollute California "big three" locations--Altamont Pass, Tehachapin, and San Gorgonio. They do but nothing kill birds as they gradually decay. The so-called "environmentalists" turn their backs on their creations. Each year the body count grows. 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually.

 

 

This is what the numbskulls who write for the Virginian Pilot want for the view from the beaches of Virginia: bird killing monuments to stupidity.

EPA 'Mistakenly' Gives Names of Farmers to Radical Groups

According to the report, the information on livestock and produce farmers was sought through a Freedom of Information Act request by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. They were given information on roughly 80,000 farmers and ranchers, though the EPA later said it made a mistake by releasing the information.

So the EPA sent them the names, addresses, phone numbers and other private personal information so that they could be harassed more effectively.

The Hockey Stick, Broken Again

John Hinderaker at Powerline discussed the latest attempt to resurrect Michael Mann's "hockey stick" with what appears to be fraulent data.

He asks:

One more thought: the publicly available evidence suggests that alarmist scientists have repeatedly committed fraud in research conducted and papers published that were paid for by United States taxpayers. It seems inconceivable that felonies have not been committed in connection with those frauds. Are there not criminal statutes that prohibit the publication of fraudulent data in taxpayer-supported research? Eric Holder, obviously, will not pursue any such line of inquiry, but there must be state law enforcement authorities who could look into this question. Fraudsters like Bernie Madoff, for instance, have tried to hide the decline in the value of funds invested with them. But that is nothing compared to the fraud that the global warming alarmists have perpetrated.

Actually John, one tried. Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli tried to open an investigation into the research conducted by Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. His efforts were roundly denounced by the media, he was pilloried as an anti-science zealot opposed to academic freedom, stonewalled by the UVA administration and his investigation was stopped by the state Supreme Court. I suspect than anyone who attempts to do what you suggest would get the same treatment.

 

Here's another interesting fact from John's article. 

 

We are reminded of the NOAA/NCDC weather data on the U.S., which are routinely relied on by alarmists who claim that the last few years have been the warmest ever. In order to justify this assertion, NOAA has gone back and revised the data for prior decades. Instead of reporting temperatures for prior decades, like the 1930s, as it did at the time and for many years thereafter, NOAA has now changed those temperatures downward to support the politically-motivated claim that the last years of the 20th century were the warmest ever. If you look at NOAA data today for the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, etc., you will have no idea that the numbers NOAA now reports are not the ones that were measured by thermometers at the time.