Tidbits

All meetings all the time: we hear from COP Whatever via email that “Next week Green Transformation (GX) Week gets underway on Monday 20 April in tandem with UN Climate Week 3 (CW3), which kicks off on Tuesday 21 April.” And apparently a highlight will be UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell saying what he always does, with this new wrinkle: “Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer and faster-to-market.” Right. Which is why countries that traded their domestic oil and gas production capacity for windmills are laughing off the Iran War while those who foolishly went in for drilling and fracking are… uh…
Stiell added: “Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.” Neither do wars disrupt the supply of wicks for candles, sticks for fire and lots of other primitive and inadequate energy sources, because people don’t fight over stuff that doesn’t work.
We learn from Blacklock’s Reporter that something called a “net zero” federal garage in Whitehorse that was supposed to be completed in two years at a cost of $754,000 instead took seven years and cost $1,774,927. In case you’re wondering, Whitehorse is not to be mistaken for “Vale of” and “White Horse” in Oxfordshire. This one’s in Canada’s Yukon Territory which has a lot of hydro power (72% of generation) so why do they need net zero anything? Other than to reward the lucky state-favoured contractors. Plus what is a “net zero” garage? One where you can’t idle a gas car?
It’s not just Whitehorse. Blacklock’s also reports that “The Department of Natural Resources billed taxpayers to install electric auto charging stations at federal buildings that are almost never used, records show. Thousands of stations averaged fewer than one car a day.” So the same government that wants to force us all to buy EVs hasn’t managed to buy them itself, even though it gets to buy them with our money.
For those who get turned on by climate hectoring: the Guardian notes approvingly that the filmmaker behind the climate hectoring flop Don’t Look Up has hired a porn actress named Megan Prescott and a ‘climate narrative strategist’ Jessica Riches to make “Newds”, in which OnlyFans models will strip while lecturing viewers about the climate crisis. Even if it works, we assure you that we shall remain fully dressed in our videos.
From fantasy-land, “French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer have announced plans to organize a conference later this week to set up a ‘strictly defensive’ mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to civilian shipping, free of tolls.” Yeah. You and whose navy? It is typical of these fantasists to meet a crisis by leaping into conference. But Iran won’t care and neither will Israel and the US, which pretty much leaves your press secretary.
At the recent Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change, ex-climate-activist Lucy Biggers explained that a key moment in her transformation into a sane person on the subject was that COVID lockdowns only reduced annual GHG emissions by 5% and she realized therefore that Net Zero would destroy our way of life. Why more haven’t figured this out, especially those who work in energy-intensive industries, we will leave to them to explain. But we will note that the problem is being made even more obvious by the disruptions due to the Iran War which, for all the sound and fury, is nothing in terms of loss of energy compared to Net Zero.
And from the land of imaginary data, Bloomberg Green shrieks that “California Utility Bills Are 20% Higher Due to Wildfires/ A new government report warns that climate change could upend the state’s economy if policy makers don’t act.” But how can it be if wildfires are not increasing in the US, nor are natural disasters? Well, assert instead of researching: “The escalating cost of wildfires now adds $41 to the average monthly power bill for residential customers of California’s largest utility, according to a government report that calls for a systemic overhaul of how the state responds to conflagrations as climate change-driven disasters threaten its economy.” Actually even Wikipedia, which insists that “Climate change in California has lengthened the fire season and made it more extreme from the middle of the 20th century”, admits up front that “Pre-1800, when the area was much more forested and the ecology much more resilient, 4.4-11.9 million acres (1.8-4.8 million hectares) of forest and shrubland burned annually” whereas “since 2000, the area that burned annually has ranged between 90,000 acres, or 0.09%, and 1,590,000 acres, or 1.59% of the total land of California.” And while giving full credit to inept fire management in the formerly Golden State, now apparently a kind of Maillard-reaction golden-brown, it lists area burned per year since 2000 and neither the number of fires nor the area burned is increasing. Just government incompetence and blame-shifting.

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