- Speaking of climate fantasies, and obsessions, Jeva Lange at Heatmap offers us “18 Climate Books to Read in 2025/ And another 14 honorable mentions for the heck of it.” Never mind that silly old Shakespeare. We’ve got Madeleine Watts, because she’s really into “cli-fi” in which instead of talking about what is happening people howl about what might be in an alternate reality. Not everything on her list is fiction, at least not intentionally. But virtually none of it contains “any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” or “any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence”. So we say if you’re really in the fortunate position that you might read 32 books in the coming year, you try to broaden your focus a bit and also sharpen it.
- The same Jeva Lange also warned of the end of winter (that again zzzzzzzz). Specifically “When there is no snow, that [long winter] night feels even more endless. As temperatures warm around the globe, snowfall is noticeably declining, which actually makes winters in northern climates darker since snow reflects so much light. With some parts of the U.S. set to lose 10% to 20% of their snowpack per decade due to climate change, darker and rainier winters are likely in store for millions of us.” So is it something that has happened? (Answer: no. Winter snowpack is not diminishing in North America.) It’s something she sees around her because someone, specifically um Jeva Lange, told her it would be going to have happened.
- With the passing of Jimmy Carter at age 100 the MSM uniformly declared that he had retrospectively become a climate alarmist and a superb visionary president rather than the abject failure nearly everyone thought he was at the time, based on an MSM consensus that etc. The New York Times “Climate Forward” praised “Carter’s enduring environmental legacy”, saying: “Carter, who died this week at 100, was the first American president to grasp the seriousness of the climate crisis and try to do something about it.” Except he left office more than a decade before the first IPCC report, in which they didn’t even conclude warming was noticeable let alone manmade and it’s revisionism on steroids to say he gave any thought to the climate “crisis”. And while he famously put solar panels on the roof of the White House, to deal with a supposed lack of oil not a climate crisis, he also put price caps on gasoline so people could buy more of it, although that idea backfired when it caused shortages, lineups, and one of the worst presidential losses (49 of 50 states) in history. Making you wonder what they even think “enduring” means. In our dictionary it’s not “immediately reversed”. (For instance historians rarely speak of Jefferson Davis’s “enduring legacy” of Southern independence.)
- Euronews.green even predicted climate history that didn’t happen with “Solar panels and saving energy: Jimmy Carter will be remembered as America’s first green president”. Which might annoy Richard Nixon, who created the EPA. Since Carter left the White House 44 years ago it seems fair to talk about what he actually was remembered for not what they think he will be going to have been supposed to be remembered for (in 1900, for instance, people weren’t speculating whether Lincoln would be recalled for his Civil War leadership).
- To be fair, what Carter is remembered for includes installing solar panels which never supplied enough power to run the place so the White House is still dependent on the grid a half-century later. So they were, like so much of his presidency, useless and symbolic only of futulity.
- It’s also noteworthy, if rarely noted in such publications, that another part of Carter’s “enduring environmental legacy” was his infamous “malaise” speech in 1979 in which he asked for authority to meet the energy crisis with “mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing” rather than, oh, say, increasing production. (Don’t tell Euronews.green he also praised coal and shale oil, though.) A horrified public sent him packing.
- Speaking of geopolitical weakness, another dismal part of Carter’s legacy, the New York Times reports that “Ukraine Halts the Flow of Natural Gas From Russia to Europe”. Apparently it has dawned on some people that destroying your own economy in order to put yourself at the mercy of dictators not only isn’t a great plan, it doesn’t even sound like one. Even the Times gets that “Kyiv’s decision to suspend the flow of gas through a pipeline that had carried Soviet and then Russian gas to Europe for decades is part of a broader campaign by Ukraine and its Western allies to undermine Moscow’s ability to fund its war effort and to limit the Kremlin’s ability to use energy as leverage in Europe.” Look for the usual suspects to denounce it. (Starting with the Kremlin’s minions, who say it will only hurt Europe.)
- Also indirectly speaking of Carter, one of whose “triumphs” was to give away the Panama Canal in a turbulent world, the climate-obsessed climate obsessives at the New York Times inform us that “To imagine the kind of future a hotter, dryer climate may bring, and the geopolitical challenges it will create, look no further than two parts of the world that Donald Trump wants America to control: Greenland and the Panama Canal.” Right. Because we all know Trump is a committed climate alarmist, and what may happen later already did. Or something. Like that drought is closing the canal so naturally Trump wants to grab the resulting ditch and… and… plant kale?
- In a piece redolent of the vacuous boilerplate politicians emit, Ontario’s Minister of Finance boasts that a credit upgrade after “a decade-long trend of downgrades,” most of which coincided with his government’s tenure, is proof that they’re great money managers. Including that “We’ve also attracted tens of billions of dollars in investments, including $43 billion in our electric vehicle and EV battery sector.” No. You’ve haven’t “attracted” anything, you’ve thrown away tens of billions of other peoples’ dollars in subsidies to the EV industry to create Potemkin factories with Potemkin jobs.
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08 Jan 2025 | News Roundup
