- Speaking of tossing gold bars off the Titanic, and missing the lifeboat, Climate Change Dispatch informs us that “A battery recycling company that the Biden administration urged to apply for a $375 million green energy loan in November warned investors this week that it’s at risk of going out of business. Li-Cycle Holdings’s annual report filed with the SEC on Monday states that it has ‘incurred significant losses since inception’ and that there is ‘substantial doubt’ about its ability to continue operating.” So there’s money well hurled. Thank goodness that awful Donald Trump and that worse Elon Musk didn’t somehow prevent it going out the porthole.
- Alas, Climate Depot reports, somebody did get to the EPA Museum, a monument to Al Gore that somehow cost $4 million to build and $600k a year to operate despite filling only a single room which, given almost complete lack of interest, was sufficient to accommodate the trickle of visitors. Does no one understand value for public money?
- A lot of people are against Donald Trump’s tariff war because tariffs are bad and trade wars are worse. Even Heatmap, apparently, even though they explain the stock market took a hit “because of anxiety about what the tariffs will do to economic growth – and electricity demand growth as a result.” Which they ought to think is good, right? Fewer power plants running is what Heatmap wants, right? What’s more, they also say “Trump’s Tariffs Are a Catastrophe for the Oil Industry”. So why aren’t they happy with them?
- Meanwhile the spin cycle churns out “Why Climate Change Could Ruin Your Next Vacation” from Climate Cosmos. Oh oh teacher we know. It’s because you could spend it reading panicky hype about implausible scenarios instead of relaxing and enjoying life. Or because you could be relaxing and enjoying life and some bore in the next beach chair starts berating you about sea level rise. Are we right? No. Instead the piece starts “Weather, once a reliable factor in planning vacations, is now a wild card.” Whereupon we laughed so hard the little umbrella came out our nose and we couldn’t read any further. Just kidding. We’re careful with those things. And item #2 was “Coastal destinations are a favorite among vacationers, but rising sea levels pose a grave threat to these idyllic spots.” So yeah, you could get there and the sea could come up three feet on the first day. It’s called “the tide”.
- In keeping with its newfound mission to politicize everything in the name of preserving the integrity and reputation of science as a left-wing pursuit, Scientific American offers “• What do we know about the Heard and McDonald Islands, where there are no human inhabitants to pay tariffs?” Which turns out to be that there’s nobody there but them seals and penguins, the latter having (we will delicately note, in keeping with our ban on vulgarity) a manner of exporting that might justify barriers, the islands being “Earth’s only volcanically active sub-Antarctic islands” and Trump being bad. Oh, and sometimes scientists lack flair; the piece explains that the islands are pristine, largely free of invasives including the human kind, and thus house unique species such as “a sheathbill subspecies called the Heard Island Sheathbill.” However did they devise that name? But of course (drum roll plus hankies please): “Heard Island’s glaciers are relatively shallow and fast-moving. They have responded to rising global temperatures more quickly than glaciers elsewhere, retreating significantly in recent years, according to UNESCO.” So they seem to be warming faster than the average just like everywhere else.
- And from the “wake us when it doesn’t happen” file, “Experts Say the Gulf Stream May Collapse Sooner Than Expected”. And when is it expected to collapse? Any day now. So maybe it collapsed a century ago or something.
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16 Apr 2025 | News Roundup
“Weather, once a reliable factor in planning vacations, is now a wild card.” Whoever wrote that is so obviously not a Brit! There's a reason we Brits flock on holiday to countries with sunshine and higher temperatures - of the sort that would have Earth boiling according to certain officious people!