Tidbits

Digger deeper: the New York Times keeps hyping the Tom Cruise climate-hectoring-postmodernist bomb Digger with a guest essay whose headline defies satire: “Tom Cruise’s Big Flop Is a Secret Masterpiece”. (Take that, Babylon Bee.) You see, or don’t, that “The director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has hidden a quiet, thoughtful movie about our collective failure to act on climate change inside the husk of an earsplitting, empty one. As a result, ‘Digger’ may be the best climate crisis movie ever made, cleverly disguised as the worst.” And it gets worse, because the reviewer claims “Climate crisis movies have always been notoriously hard to make, for the same reason the climate crisis is hard to combat: It’s too big.” Was World War II hard to fight or make movies about because it was too big? No. The Nazi-fascist-Imperial Japanese threat elicited a huge response because it was so big, and then an apparently endless stream of great films along with mediocre ones and stinkers. Meanwhile apparently “‘Digger’ succeeds where previous climate-warning films have fallen short because it truly captures what the cultural critic Amitav Ghosh called ‘the great derangement,’ our total imaginative failure in the face of the scale of what is happening to the planet.” So unlike, say, An Inconvenient Truth, whose box office take was roughly 30 times its production cost, and which wowed critics and won two Oscars and umpteen other awards because nobody told Al Gore climate movies were hard to make, this one’s a winner except for being awful and a money pit. There’s postmodernism for you.
The Thwaites-of-the-week item this week is The Weather Network, or something going by that name but apparently hijacked by climate alarmists, hollers “Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier is melting twice as fast as we previously thought”. And we holler “Double play” because they got in Thwaites and the settled science being worse than scientists thought even though they already thought it was worse than the worst thing ever.
The latest thing in EVs, infamous for being slow to charge and quick to need recharging, is “bidirectional charging” where instead of you juicing them overnight from your house they can juice your house for you as the grid buckles under the magic of the green energy transition. Canary Media is excited that “Ford’s forthcoming electric pickup truck will be loaded with a pretty powerful feature: the ability to provide backup energy to your home.” And Heatmap delivers the verdict before the trial: “The Ford Fathom Will Bring Bi-Directional Charging to the Masses”. Of course since zealots have often jumped the gun on various allegedly promising low-carbon technologies, including EVs, it would be wise to be cautious about a truck that hasn’t even appeared yet, let alone wowed “the masses.” Also,… uh… didn’t the F-150 Lightning have it too? Um yeah, Heatmap concedes. But this time for sure: “The Ford Fathom… might also show Americans the EV’s enormous role in the home, and the grid, of tomorrow.” Unless it doesn’t.
The Manhattan Contrarian has often voiced his reasonable request that we get a small-scale demonstration of the feasibility of a zero-carbon transition before betting the economy on it. And sometimes he gets an answer, though not always on purpose. Including that “On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant.” Except eight years of data show that “the wind/storage system provided 56% of the island’s electricity use in the best year, and only 35% in the worst year” and the rest came from, oh dear, “a diesel generator”. Whereas, he laments, “Here in the U.S., during the Obama and Biden administrations, the regulators took the opposite approach. Rather than proceeding like El Hierro, and building out a wind/storage (or a wind/solar/storage) system first, and only then reducing fossil-fuel backup capacity as that became feasible, they instead ordered that the fossil-fuel capacity must be shut on a fixed schedule without any knowledge or assurance that there would be sufficient wind, solar, storage, or anything else to replace it. And this was for the whole country, not just for a small island of 11,000 people. All 340+ million Americans were to be enlisted as involuntary guinea pigs in this wild adventure.” As were the people of Germany, he adds, before asking “When are they finally going to figure it out?” Ah but see it’s so much fun just to imagine instead.
Speaking of bad economics, we noted last week that the Canadian government is shoveling money at the makers of heat pumps while Prime Minister Mark Carney holds shares in heat-pump makers. Which in many places not conspicuous for their high ethical standards would nevertheless be regarded as a pretty flagrant conflict of interest. And now we learn from Blacklock’s Reporter (but not the government-subsidized “mainstream” media”) that the federal Major Projects Office, whose job is supposedly to decide which projects get special expedited approval, employs some 200 people on half-pay from private firms and they were never vetted by the Ethics Commissioner. Of course when you go from morals to ethics you get what you deserve. But it’s still rather brazen. Especially the bit where the head of the MPO conceded to a Parliamentary Committee that she didn’t know how many such people she was even employing but “there are no conflicts of interest with these employees” and you can be sure because they kept it all in-house and secret. Or when she was asked whether companies were paying for people to go into government and approve projects “out of the goodness of their heart” and she said “It is, actually.” Goodness gracious. Are they fools, do they think we are, or both?
Speaking of fools, apparently this heatpump giveaway is such a money-saver that over at “Clean Prosperity” they say the feds should seize the opportunity to hurl uncounted billions at the electric grid lest it should collapse in the face of surging demand. And create “a standing federal-provincial working group for regional planning” because nothing says dynamic like an interdepartmental committee. Meanwhile Michelle Stirling had the gall to inform a parliamentary committee that heat pumps don’t work nearly as well if it gets below 4C which you’d think even Canadian MPs would know is not uncommon in a place called Canada. Though perhaps not a Prime Minister who’s forever on a jet plane to somewhere warmer anyway for something super-exciting like “Prime Minister Carney’s historic visit to Türkiye launches new Strategic Partnership across trade, defence, and energy”.
On the plus side, National Geographic reports on pioneering work on the understudied tropical rainforest canopy. The bad news is that “Borneo’s ultra-tall forests” are under threat. The good news is that the story blames the problem on overlogging, not least due to “the dominance of commercially valuable dipterocarp trees” in this forest. And doesn’t say a word about climate change. Just possibly the fever is breaking.
From the department of mathiness, Grist shares a story from The Trace, “a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America”, claiming “Higher temperatures fuel gun violence. Now we know how much is from climate change.” Not that it’s bad to shoot people, you understand. “‘Those who commit gun violence are in a vulnerable population that have limited economic ability to make sure that they have air conditioning,’ said Marion Campbell, executive director of Eddie’s House, a Philadelphia nonprofit that provides violence prevention and social services to such populations. ‘When you get hot you get irritated, OK! I’m just going to keep it real. You get irritated and your inability to manage your frustration could be heightened.’” We didn’t know keeping it real meant blowing your top and someone else’s, but live and learn. “A new finding shared with The Trace by Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on climate change research and communication, estimates that approximately 2,000 shootings between 2021 and 2025 in the 100 U.S. cities with the most gun violence are attributable to high temperatures made more likely by climate change.” And there’s a bit of “World ends, women and minorities hit hardest” about it, since in New York City, within the Bronx, “Neighborhoods like Mott Haven are known as urban heat islands, and nationally, they disproportionately affect residents who are not white. Mott Haven itself is 97 percent Black and Latino.” So um how much of the heat and therefore the climate-made-me-do-it shooting is actually due to the same Urban Heat Island effect that also distorts temperature readings? Oh, and you have to follow a series of links before you discover that lurking in the alley is, yes, Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution.

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