Prof. Larry Bell: This would occur as China and India which have represented 80% of the emission increases and are not bound to the pact, are dramatically ramping up coal and oil development. Although Beijing agreed to peak its emissions by 2030, they have a pass to do nothing to stem growth of CO2 emission growth during the 15 years leading up to that deadline. Meanwhile, China’s coal consumption has continued to increase in line with a rise in overall energy demand following a 2014-2016 "permitting surge" by local governments aiming to boost growth. When President Xi Jinping announced in September of 2019 that China would be carbon-neutral, he generously gave coal a four-decade-long "transition period."

“They want to use the COVID lockdown as the model for climate lockdowns,” said Morano of Democrats and the broader left, offering his remarks on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. Morano noted how the coronavirus outbreak displaced “climate change” as the left’s “ticket to a Soviet-style regulatory state.” Morano recalled how assorted left-wing doomsday narratives from previous decades — including “global cooling” and “overpopulation” — were framed as justifications for implementation of totalitarian central planning and control. “It was all based on the same concept, that everything’s limited, we’re all going to die and and we need to essentially turn our lives over to central planning,” Morano stated. ... 

Morano added, “Bill Gates has said the COVID pandemic is nothing compared to how many deaths — the death toll — that’s going to come from climate change. Guess what academics already want to do? They want a provision to add climate change to your death certificate, and this is a very real possibility.”

Incoming U.S. President Joe Biden has promised an “all-of-government” approach to fight climate change that would require federal agencies from the Defense Department to the Treasury to help the administration achieve its goal of sharply slashing nationwide greenhouse gas emissions. ... 

"Every agency is a climate agency now," said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of Evergreen Action, an advocacy group that advised Biden’s transition team on climate change. ...

The Education Department could direct federal dollars toward funding of specialized teachers and programs to raise awareness of climate change and use its procurement powers to assist in the electrification of bus fleets and greening of school buildings.

The world’s biggest coal miner and consumer produced 3.84 billion tonnes of coal in 2020, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Monday.

Eric Holthaus: 'The Biden-Harris Administration will take an intersectional approach to heal a country in crisis...President Biden has a climate mandate."

"Simply put: President Joe Biden’s first days in office will kick off the best chance we’ve ever had to make transformational changes throughout society at the scale necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. The stakes could not be higher. Climate change is the gravest existential threat our species has ever faced." ... 

"We’ve finally got a real chance at this. And as someone who has been working on climate my entire adult life, it feels really, really good to say that. Like the IPCC said, we’ll need transformational change in all aspects of society to get ourselves out of this mess, and establish what the Sunrise Movement calls the Decade of the Green New Deal." 

Treasury Sec. nominee Janet Yellen: “I will look to appoint someone at a very senior level to lead our efforts,” Yellen told members of the Senate Finance Committee. She said doing so would create a hub within Treasury that would focus on financial system-related risk posed by climate change, and tax policy incentives to affect change.

“We need to seriously look at assessing the risk to the financial system from climate change,” Yellen said.

Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Narendra Modi will apparently gather in the Netherlands. There, along with Bill Gates, UN head Antonio Guterres, and personnel associated with the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, they’ll attend a climate summit hosted by the Global Center on Adaptation. ... 

We’re told this summit "will launch a comprehensive Adaptation Action Agenda to kick start a transformational decade." 

Donna Laframboise: "The chutzpah is astonishing. The global economy is in tatters. Billions face an uncertain future. Health care workers are exhausted. Yet this Clique of Self-Important People™ is full speed ahead, determined to impose its climate vision on the rest of us." 

Selected Highlights: "The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.

The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.

Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.

Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule. ...

The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump. ...

The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles."

TRUMP: "I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars."

Marc Morano: Thank you, Mr. President! You have achieved what few Presidents have when it comes to securing the U.S.'s national security. Your energy policies contributed greatly to achieving no new wars. Previous Presidents paid lip service to "energy independence" but during your administration, you not only achieved it, but you also went one step better -- you presided over an American energy renaissance that led to U.S. energy dominance!

In 2019, “U.S. energy exports exceeded imports for the first time since 1952,” the EIA reported. The EIA also reported, “In 2019, U.S. energy production exceeded energy consumption for the first time since 1957,” when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. Trump's energy achievements were so off the charts that the last time the U.S. saw this kind of energy dominance was when Harry S. Truman was president in 1952!

Chomsky claimed that people who oppose wearing masks are an “epidemic” in American politics, more concerned about protecting their freedoms than following science:

“I mean, do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly?” he questioned. “That’s what it means not to wear a mask. It’s a strange kind of individualism.”

Maggie Thomas has been tapped for the Office of Domestic Climate Policy chief of staff and Cecilia Martinez will serve as “senior director for environmental justice. Both incoming advisers have said racism drives climate change while insisting Biden’s environmental reforms should be based on “racial and economic justice.” ... 

Daniel Turn, founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Power the Future, told the Free Beacon that it looks like the incoming Biden administration is trying to justify nationalizing “the nation’s energy industry” under the pretenses of “racism” and “justice.” “Punishing America’s energy workers will do nothing to address climate change and it will do nothing to address injustices. It will, however, cause the prices of gas and utilities to rise sharply, and that will punish the less privileged most of all,” Turner told the outlet. “We do need to talk about housing, employment, and racism, but doing so under the pretext of energy policy will deliver muddied, expensive, and pointless legislation.”

California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control.

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Flashback: California’s energy nightmare & California Governor Bans Sale Of New Gas-Powered Cars Beginning In 2035 – Claims ‘most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change’

An ‘Ecotopian’ Future: Can California’s Green Extremism Go National? Seek ‘handing over power to credentialed environmental ‘experts’ - Joel Kotkin: This is a state that issues mandates for electrification of everything while reducing its generating capacity. It blames devastating fires on climate change, without taking the blame for forestry practices that helped make the seasonal fires much worse. In California, pot is legal, but owning a car with a gas engine, however clean, may soon not be, and climate skeptics of any stripe face opprobrium, consignment to obscurity, and—if they have assets—court dates. ... The Coming Autocracy - It’s unlikely that voters will long embrace such ideas. But many greens, concerned that the masses may not follow orders, prefer the post-democratic method of handing over power to credentialed environmental “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations, a notion already advanced by former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag and journalist Thomas Friedman.

Greenpeace: 'This is no coincidence. The climate is changing, and it's affecting our weather in a variety of ways all across the globe. Let’s demand world leaders to take this #ClimateCrisis seriously and act to stop it!'

Record Cold/Snow caused by ‘global warming’?! Climate activists predict both outcomes — more snow, less snow — so they are never wrong – Book excerpt

It’s hardly news that the true cost of generating electricity using wind power is staggering; the cost of doing so offshore is astronomical.

...

The government said Thursday it will remove the two remaining wind power turbines it installed off Fukushima Prefecture citing lack of profit in the project, which cost ¥60 billion ($580 million).

In the last 500 years only some 80 mammals are recorded as having gone extinct. In his book, More From Less, Andrew McAfee, a board member of HumanProgress.org, discusses how relatively rare recorded extinctions are – with some 530 across all species in the last five centuries. More importantly, he notes, the rate of extinction “appear[s] to have slowed down in recent decades; for example, no marine creatures have been recorded as extinct in the last fifty years.”

Matt Ridley, another board member and frequent contributor to this site, argues that despite the human population doubling in the last half-century, “the extinction rate of wild species, especially in the most industrialized countries,” seems to have fallen rather than increased. While absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence, and there might be millions of unrecorded species in the world’s oceans and tropical forests, the most aggressive claims rest on shaky foundations.

“Africa’s electricity demand is set to increase significantly as the continent strives to industrialise and improve the wellbeing of its people, which offers an opportunity to power this economic development through renewables,” says Galina Alova, study lead author and researcher at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Aloya adds: “There is a prominent narrative in the energy planning community that the continent will be able to take advantage of its vast renewable energy resources and rapidly decreasing clean technology prices to leapfrog to renewables by 2030 – but our analysis shows that overall it is not currently positioned to do so.” The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects.

CNN: Jon Aars, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute: "Polar bears are optimistic animals," Aars says. "It seems that they are quite resistant, and they are doing quite well despite the fact that they've lost a lot of their habitat." Despite the odds, Svalbard's polar bear numbers do not appear to have decreased in the last 20 years, he says.

In 2018, about 5.1 million EVs were in use around the globe. That means that cutting domestic gasoline demand by a third would require the U.S. to deploy roughly 20 times as many EVs as are now being used around the world. That’s a tall order. ... Richard Herrington, the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, and seven of his colleagues sent a letter to the British government that underscored the scale of the challenge. Herrington and his colleagues calculated the amount of commodities, including rare earth elements, that would be needed to convert all the United Kingdom’s 31 million motor vehicles to electric drive. (Rare earths are a group of 17 elements that includes neodymium, an essential ingredient in electric motors.) They found that doing so would require “two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three-quarters of the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018.”

The U.S. has about 276 million registered motor vehicles, or roughly nine times as many vehicles as the U.K. Thus, if Herrington’s numbers are right, electrifying all of U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production.

Note: Economist Sanjeev Sabhlok, resigned from his job in the Department of Treasury and Finance in Victoria Australia in September 2020 “to protest the outrageous violations of liberty” due to the COVID lockdowns. 

Sanjeev Sabhlok rips lockdown apologists: "This is a piece clearly from someone who has worked from home and enjoyed the lockdowns. This was a big test of science and philosophy and we have failed on both counts...The science was very clear: there shall be no lockdowns for flu-like viruses."

"Australia should never be cited as an example: it is nothing short of the most inhumane totalitarian society in the world today, not a role model for anyone in the civilized world or for anyone who considers himself human...Those of us who have lived through living hell in Melbourne & locked up in Australia like chicken in a coop (borders closed), w/ wide-scale police brutalities on young who underwent most extreme mental torture ever, know this is the worst form of civilisation in human history."

"Are we going to do this for all other pandemics in the future? Is this our new “science” – divested entirely from consideration of humanity and liberty? I’m afraid I will never support such “science”. ... "See my complaint to the International Criminal Court for details. We do not authorize a government to take the life of person X while trying to save the life of person Y."

Hulme: "January  12021, a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climatological standard normal came into effect. The ‘present-day’ climate will now formally be
represented by the meteorological statistics of the period 1991-2020, replacing those from 1961-1990. National Meteorological Agencies in member states are instructed to issue new standard normals for observing stations and for associated climatological products. Climate will ‘change’, one might say, in an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer. It is somewhat equivalent to re-setting Universal Time or adjusting the exact definition of a metre." ...

"So, what is the significance of the move to a new 1991-2020 WMO normal in January 2021? On the one hand, it is a pragmatic move to redefine ‘present-day’ climate for operational applications to that of the most recent 30-year period. On the other hand, it puts into play a third climatic baseline. Already existing is the ‘pre-industrial’ climate of the late nineteenth century and the ‘historic’ climate’ of 1961-1990, the latter about 0.3°C warmer than the former. And now there is the new ‘present-day’ climate of 1991-2020, in turn about 0.5°C warmer than the ‘historic climate’ of 1961-1990." ...

"Combining a climatic tolerance of 2°C—or indeed 1.5°C—with a pre-industrial baseline yields a very different climate target than, say, using a 1986-2005 baseline, the period widely adopted by IPCC AR5 Working Group I as their analytical baseline. The choices of both baseline and tolerance are politically charged. They carry significant implications for historic liability for emissions (La Rovere et al., 2002), for policy design (Millar et al., 2017) and for possible reparations (Roberts & Huq, 2015)."

AP: 'Hottest year on record': 2020 sets yet another global temperature record

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Rebuttal: David Whitehouse of The Global Warming Policy Forum: "A temperature anomaly for 2020 of 0.98 +/- 0.15 °C compared to 1.00 +/- 0.15 °C for 2016 (which was the year with the strongest recorded El Nino). The difference is trivial, especially since the precision of the mean is reported to thousandths of a degree. Looking at NOAA’s data for previous years you can see that every year since 2015 falls within one standard deviation of the mean. Such a simple and unbiased view of the data leads to a much more justifiable headline for the data: There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years, as NOAA has confirmed." ... 

"A number of months in early 2020 were affected by El Niño conditions, very different from what the WMO Secretary-General has claimed. It is true that 2016 would have been cooler but for the El Nino and 2020 warmer but for the La Nina. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, the El Nino effect can be seen over several years making estimates for greenhouse gas forcing problematic." ... 

"The increase in atmospheric CO2 between 2015-2019 made no difference to global temperatures and neither has the 7% fall in global CO2 emissions observed in 2020."

Also see: Here we go again: 2020 claimed to be ‘tied with 2016’ for ‘Hottest year’ declaration

UN touts being 'the champion of non-anthropocentrism'

"The Nonhuman Rights Project in the United States instituted court proceedings on behalf of elephants and chimpanzees, arguing that they should be treated as “persons” and freed from captivity." ... 

"In Sweden, the organizations Swedish Earth Rights Lawyers and Rights of Nature Sweden have drafted a declaration for the rights of Lake Vattern."  ... 

"The need for jointly imagining and creating a new normalcy that prioritizes planetary health and human well-being for all."  ...

"The process of recovery from COVID-19 provides us with a unique opportunity to build back better, together, so as to transform the world into one where humans truly live in harmony with Nature."

Christopher Monckton: "At long last, following the warming effect of the El Niño of 2016, there are signs of a reasonably significant La Niña, which may well usher in another Pause in global temperature, which may even prove similar to the Great Pause that endured for 224 months from January 1997 to August 2015, during which a third of our entire industrial-era influence on global temperature drove a zero trend in global warming. ... As we come close to entering the la Niña, the trend in global mean surface temperature has already been zero for 5 years 4 months. 

However, the new Pause is at a surface-temperature plateau 0.3 C° above the old Pause." 

Scientists continued defying the “unprecedented” global warming narrative by publishing nearly 150 papers  in 2020 that show large regions of the Earth (a) haven’t warmed in recent decades, (b) were as-warm or warmer within the last several centuries, and/or (c) were 1-7°C warmer than today just a few millennia ago.

Greanpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore: "What a farce the IPCC Paris Accord and all previous 'agreements' to reduce CO2 emissions have been. If only the collective billionaire-class would recognize that CO2 is entirely beneficial we could get on with making the world a better place."

Climate Depot's Marc Morano: "Get ready for more futility as the Green New Deal will continue meaningless 'climate action.'"