- You’re charging me for this? A car insurance company burbles “Here’s an estimate of what your CO2 emissions have been over the past month.” Pro tip: try focusing on what customers want not what you think they should want.
- Good news: the solar storm we mentioned last week has come and gone leaving only memories of some spectacular northern lights as far south as San Antonio, Texas. But we repeat that it’s all fun and photos until someone loses a server, or a power plant control module, so the authorities really need to think more about hardening our infrastructure, in case we get another solar storm that’s sufficiently stronger than that one that it does wreak havoc, and just a bit less about how CO2 is the only real issue.
- As to the perplexity of alarmists that, for instance, the Inflation Reduction Act isn’t a big vote-winner for the Democrats, the extraordinary result of recent polling is that most Americans aren’t climate alarmists. Something that surely ought especially to have interested the alarmists, since if they want to win the political battles they actually do have to convince, well, voters. But everyone’s an alarmist inside their echo chamber, so they missed it. Including Inside Climate News with a fanciful piece “In Competitive Purple Districts, GOP House Members Paint Themselves Green/ Climate activists are calling out incumbents’ poor environmental records in a coordinated drive to flip the House to Democratic control.” In those hotbeds of Republicanism, New York and California, the latter of which hasn’t given its Electoral College votes to a Republican since 1988 and the former since 1984.
- On the other hand, the growing realism among some alarmists includes an email from Canary Media admitting that “Green hydrogen might have plenty of subsidies – and hype – but the industry is still struggling to get off the ground.” The actual story treats the issue as a temporary setback… probably. But not a trivial one. Another Canary Media piece concedes that “Booming power demand is slowing climate progress for US utilities”. And a third warns that Vermont’s touted pathbreaking “clean heat standard” is a conceptual and regulatory nightmare in the making. (There was also an Inside Climate News exposé of “chemical recycling of plastic waste” that warned that it releases greenhouse gases while turning the waste back into “fossil fuels”.) The more people focus on what actually is happening, regardless of what they think should be happening or expect to happen soon, the more sensible the discussion will be. Who knows? Newsrooms might even consider making it a rule to report what is going on not what they wish was going on.
- At the other end of the spectrum, NBC proclaims that “Evangelical environmentalists push for climate votes as election nears”. And anyone who actually believes there will be a surge of bedrock Christian voters to Kamala Harris over “taking action on climate” deserves the reporting they get.
- Oh, and speaking of echo chambers, Blacklock’s Reporter informs us that “Cabinet proposed renaming inflation as ‘heat-flation’ to persuade Canadians to associate the rising cost of living with climate change, documents show.” Sheer genius… if you’re a zealot. As Blacklock’s added drily, “The idea polled badly…. ‘Asked whether they had heard either of these terms before, none indicated they had,’” according to the ponderously named Continuous Qualitative Data Collection Of Canadians’ Views.
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16 Oct 2024 | News Roundup
