- Finally some justice for Mark Steyn: the ludicrous million-dollar damage award against him in favour of Michael Mann has been reduced to a derisory $5,000. It’s a shame it wasn’t wiped out entirely, not least because he doesn’t get to recover the horrifying costs of this endless gruelling legal ordeal while Mann had someone else paying his bills. But it may just be that, like Meghan Markle, Mann has had his 15 minutes of fame, or 15 years, and it will soon be hard to remember why he got them. And his lawfare, including the costs that were awarded against him and in favour of the late Tim Ball, which Mann never paid, leaving Ball’s widow to crowdfund his funeral, may soon also be a baffling and odious thing of the past. But as Roger Pielke Jr. posted “I wonder if Science, NYT, Wash Post and others who celebrated the original verdict will cover this at all”. Stay tuned.
- And stay tuned as another one bites the dust. A major Japanese bank just pulled out of Mark Carney’s Net-Zero Banking Alliance. Who’s even left?
- An alert viewer points us to a 1962 Los Angeles Fire Department film “‘Design for Disaster’ – The Story of the Bel Air Conflagration” that, in an unintentionally comic Dragnet style, shows how serious fires were there 60 years ago due to the prevailing climate conditions including those “devil winds” long before there was climate change. Including that they ran out of water then too.
- The rhetorical escalation of alarmists continues. Natural gas is now “fossil gas” (boo fossils). And also “Shock study predicts how many people will die from climate change fires by 2100”. Climate change fires. Naturally it starts “The recent LA fires devastated the region and warnings have been issued that things will only get worse from here due to climate change.” And naturally it never gets to the bit where fires have been decreasing worldwide for decades, and for centuries, with a massive “fire deficit” compared to what nature ignited 400 years ago.
- This tree for sure: The Canadian government, fresh from its humiliating failure to plant two billion trees to change the weather in a country that already has an estimated 300 billion, so it shouldn’t be that hard to add a few, is now pledging just shy of $50 million to help the City of Montreal plant 500,000 of the things in just five years. Would we be thought cheap, or brown, if we said it works out to $100 per tree on top of whatever the municipality was going to throw into a hole in the ground, in this case literally?
- Speaking of throwing money at things, we also can’t help noticing that the Canadian government is ferociously supportive of Ukraine rhetorically, but however many announcements they shower us with announcing however much spending on anything from trees to “$19.5 million to rebuild the Cobourg Harbour breakwaters and Monk’s Cove Park seawall” because “The accelerating impacts of climate change mean that the aging harbour in Cobourg is at higher risk of shoreline erosion and flooding” to “a $1.8-million investment in the development of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, a new space aiming to become a hub for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to address systemic inequities, advance reconciliation, and improve Canadians’ understanding of Indigenous Peoples through arts, heritage and educational programming” they never seem to put a penny into enhancing our capacity to produce ammunition. Not that, on the record, it would help if they did.
- Speaking of trees, apparently the whole climate crisis can be thrown to the wolves. At least so says the Daily Mail: “Want to hit Net Zero? Easy - just release WOLVES, say experts”. Bad news for Little Red McRidinghood, perhaps. According to these Big PhD Gown Hoods, “Releasing wolves into the wild in the Scottish Highlands could help alleviate the climate crisis and reach Net Zero, experts say.” And if you didn’t know wolves ate CO2, see, they eat “red deer” which then don’t eat “tree saplings and bark from older trees” on account of having been devoured themselves. And some projectors from the University of Leeds say each released wolf would thus increase “annual carbon uptake capability” by 6,080 tonnes, so on the current absurd social-cost-of-carbon figures save Britain £154,000 at 25 quid a tonne. And thus, awoocadabra, “a total population of 167 wolves across Cairngorms, South-west Highlands, Central Highlands and North-west Highlands” would gobble enough deer that forests would spring up amid the heather and “take up one million tonnes of CO2 each year” which “is approximately five per cent of the carbon removal target for UK woodlands that would be necessary for the UK to reach Net Zero by 2050, according to the Climate Change Committee.” Meaning, we suppose, that 3,340 wolves would do the trick entirely, and all at the cost of a few careless picknickers. Man. Who knew the climate crisis was that existential and that trivial at the same time?
- The whole climate panic would die down, possibly, if it were really true that humans were going to reduce their demand for oil due to technological progress, a shortage of petroleum products, or both. But “peak oil” has been an obsession among people obsessed with peak oil since the 1970s and still is. No, wait. Since the 1880s. But as Andrew Stuttaford noted in National Review, the publicly traded though mostly publicly owned Norwegian oil company Statoil changed to the trendy Equinor in 2018 in what the CEO called his “most emotional decision ever” (prompting Stuttaford’s “Norwegians are who they are”). Alas, the related surge toward renewables didn’t work out, prompting a cold-blooded move back to oil to “create shareholder value for decades to come” as peak oil was a bunch of nonsense because so are wind and solar.
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12 Mar 2025 | News Roundup
Trudeau's 2 billion tree pledge was emblematic of his entire reign. Born of ignorance and empowered by the emotional and intellectual rigor of teenage and media cheerleaders, everything he imposed on taxpayers was equally ill-conceived and delivered.