- It being the season of goodwill and all that there, we open this item by congratulating Inside Climate News, again, for a headline “A Massive, Chinese-Backed Port in Peru Could Push the Amazon Rainforest Over the Edge”. Too often environmentalism is just the red green show, with weird Hamas sympathy thrown in for bad measure. They have some enthusiasm for its ability to “revolutionize global trade” and “The port represents Peru’s first project under the banner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s $1.3 trillion bid to remake how the world travels and trades”, including getting goods too and from it over the Andes. “But environmental scientists and forestry experts warn that the economic pull of the port will speed the destruction of the Amazon, the planet’s most critical, climate-stabilizing terrestrial ecosystem.” All we ask is that they keep both eyes open as here they seem to have done.
- It being the season of illwill and all that there, the Associated Press sits there hating the Whos, including Americans evidently poised to spend over $1 trillion on Christmas gifts for the first time ever boo hiss “All of those processes release planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.” But they have plenty of festive suggestions, from organizing someone’s passwords to a mason jar of beans to “Buy less stuff” to one the Grinch’s dentist would love, putting a toothbrush in the stocking this year. The look on their faces will be priceless no doubt.
- Many taboos seem to be shattering. (Including that someone just gave us a bottle of sparkling English wine, and not someone who hates us.) Thus the University of Cambridge warns of crop failure due to climate change… and no, they don’t mean warmth. Instead a joint study with researchers from the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe “suggests that a volcanic eruption – or cluster of eruptions – around 1345 caused annual temperatures to drop for consecutive years due to the haze from volcanic ash and gases, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region.” Ingenious Italian merchants then expanded trade into the Black Sea and “This climate-driven change in long-distance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addition to life-saving food, the ships were carrying the deadly bacterium that ultimately caused the Black Death, enabling the first and deadliest wave of the second plague pandemic to gain a foothold in Europe.” What’s next, a Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age? Warmth favours crops and cold kills them? Egad.
- Heatmap Daily sneers that “It’s easy to feel jaded about America’s car culture when you travel abroad. Visit other countries and you’re likely to see a variety of cool, quirky, and affordable vehicles that aren’t sold in the United States, where bloated and expensive trucks and SUVs dominate.” Yeah. Another way of putting it is that lots of places in the world are so poor that people have to drive weird cheap boxes on wheels, but while American governments seem determined to undermine their citizens’ prosperity too a long history of individual liberty including free enterprise means the U.S. is still very rich compared to most of the world.
- In voting for the federal Liberal budget, a step mercurial Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May immediately repented, she gloated “A major win for the planet, and for the Greens. @ElizabethMay just secured a historic on-the-record promise from PM Mark Carney: Canada will meet our Paris climate targets and our Kunming–Montreal biodiversity goals. We’re not here for talk, we’re here for results.” Right. Put it with all the other historic promises they didn’t keep from a combination of self-satisfied sloth and lack of practical aptitude.
- In case you miss Al Gore, which we grant is improbable, Bloomberg Green gushed from COP30 that “Former US Vice President Al Gore has been a fixture at United Nations environmental summits for more than three decades. Despite having last held elected office in 2001, Gore still has a sharp sense of US politics. And at his appearance at COP30, he had a message for the world: ‘We may have passed peak Trump,’ giving world leaders an opening to keep pursuing emissions cuts. Gore still gets a rockstar reception at climate talks, with people wanting to shake his hand, take a selfie or simply say thank you. He handled the well-wishers with humility.” What a guy. And what nonsense, especially given what “world leaders” actually produced at the conference, which doesn’t really support the notion that they were champing at the bit “to keep pursuing emissions cuts” if only someone could cast out the orange climate demon.
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17 Dec 2025 | News Roundup
