- Roger Pielke Jr. describes venturing into the hot new BSky app because “They told me that it is far more welcoming for discussion about energy and climate” only to find that the activists created a “blocklist” promoted among others by “one of the lead scientists of the U.S. National Climate Assessment.” He rightly says “That degree of intolerance among those selected to represent the climate science community is a problem for climate science and politics.” And then he quotes the CEO of a firm that supposedly “provides energy companies with strategies to translate sustainability aspiration to action”, which honestly doesn’t sound like a real job, that “we may have reached peak all-or-nothing climate activism, simply because the solution set entrenched activists will accept is too small, too slow, and too exclusive.” And it’s interesting that one of our own observations from COP29 was that no solution that was in any way practical could possibly produce quick results, a serious problem if you believe the crisis is about to engulf us all in salt-water flames if we don’t act yesterday.
- From the “everybody knows” file, “There is still considerable debate among analysts over when global demand for oil will peak, with estimates ranging between later this decade and 2050.” Or not in anybody’s lifetime based on mere trends. But what are they to dogma?
- Marina Hyde in the Guardian, surprisingly, though as we say credit where due, eviscerates Jaguar’s new woke ad featuring pansexual space aliens rather than those boring old cars, noting “hilariously, there aren’t even any cars to buy for a while, because Jaguar will now halt output entirely for at least a year, with three new EVs not due for sale till 2026.” But the firm boasts of 15 DEI groups. Oh well. At least it will reduce its carbon footprint.
- By their emissions shall ye know them. A press release (which apparently wasn’t posted online nor was it worth posting) under the typical greasy headline “APEC A HUGE SUCCESS FOR CANADA” informed an uninterested nation and world that “Julie Dzerowicz, Member of Parliament for Davenport, joined Team Canada led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; Minister of International Trade Mary Ng; and Members of Parliament Maninder Sidhu, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade; and Marc Serre, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Official Languages and the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) from November 14-17, 2024.” And they all flew to Peru, of course, many of them immediately afterward jetting to Rio for the G20 gabfest to bore and pester hundreds of other politicians, proving that they don’t actually believe what they say about carbon footprints.
- Some people think Wikipedia is a load of dingoes’ kidneys. We actually find it surprisingly useful provided you are alert to the havoc wrought by zealots on some issues. But you have to be; for instance their item on the Antarctic ice sheet, at least as of November 22, 2024, raves on for paragraph after paragraph on the imminent melting and we’re-all-going-to-die stuff like “Paleoclimate research and improved modelling show that the West Antarctic ice sheet is very likely to disappear even if the warming does not progress any further” instead of telling us dull things like when it formed, which it buries in paragraph 27 (out of 28).
- Oil. It is a difficult concept. The New York Times Moscow bureau chief, another galactic metropolitan covering COP “bathed in oil during the U.N. climate summit. It was crude oil from a half-mile underground, pumped into a bathtub at a hotel in Azerbaijan. It crept into every crevice of my submerged body and every fold of my skin. It smothered the hair on my limbs, making me look a little like an animal stuck in an oil spill.” Yes. It would. However it seems that in Naftalan, a four-hour drive from Baku (in a gas-powered car, possibly a Lada) “The chocolate-colored oil extracted there doesn’t burn. Instead, the locals and Azerbaijani scientists say, it heals. If you bathe in it.” Naturally it’s going to run out as peak oil oils our peak or whatever it’s doing, perhaps within a mere 60 years. However “Once you bathe in crude oil, it’s hard to get rid of it. For that reason, the [resort] Garabag’s towels, bathrobes and bedsheets are all brown. My bed’s headboard had light brown stains. In the brown bathtubs in the spa area, the resin left over after draining the crude was almost black.” No kidding. We’re all for local colour but it’s a fuel not a medicine.
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27 Nov 2024 | News Roundup
Canada has a minister of language, do they have a minister of funny walks yet? Or will that be in Trudeau’s next budget? And exactly how many people work in that ministry of language, and what is their budget?