Links tagged “gnd”

Fox News Channel - Fox and Friends - Broadcast April 20, 2021

AP: "As President Joe Biden convenes a virtual climate summit on Thursday with 40 world leaders, he faces a vexing task: how to put forward a nonbinding but symbolic goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will have a tangible impact on climate change efforts not only in the U.S. but throughout the world." ... "The number has to be achievable by 2030 but aggressive enough to satisfy scientists and advocates who call the coming decade a crucial, make-or-break moment for slowing climate change, Larsen and other experts said."

"Scientists, environmental groups and even business leaders are calling on Biden to set a target that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030." 

A virtual summit President Joe Biden is hosting with dozens of world leaders April 22-23. After four years of disregard for the issue under former President Donald Trump, the summit will be "an opportunity for the U.S. to come back onto the scene to show it is taking climate change seriously," said David Waskow, International Climate Initiative director at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research and advocacy group. The White House said it will announce an "ambitious" 2030 target for greenhouse gas emissions before the summit. 

"Pushing for a bigger slice of President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan to modernize public housing with renewable energy and other climate-minded initiatives that historically have left out the most vulnerable communities. The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act invests up to $172 billion over 10 years in sustainable retrofits...— calls for turning the entire public housing system into zero-carbon, highly energy-efficient communities that produce on-site renewable energy.

Low-income households on average  spend 16.3% of their total income on energy costs compared to 3.5% for other households...The Green New Deal for Public Housing will impact nearly 2 million people living in over 950,000 public housing homes. This legislation reduces public housing water bills by up to 30% per year, or $97 million, and energy bills by up to 70% per year, or $613 million, according to the proposed legislation. It also promises more jobs and will reduce annual carbon emissions by roughly 5.6 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking over 1.2 million cars off the road.

Claim: "It is irrational to rely on capitalist solutions to global warming when it is capitalism itself that has led us towards the current path of a climate catastrophe."

Progressive economist Robert Pollin suggests that "we should think of a Global Green New Deal as exactly the equivalent of an insurance policy to protect ourselves and the planet against the serious prospect—thought not the certainty—that we are facing an ecologic catastrophe." ... 

Pollin makes a convincing argument that it is irrational to rely on capitalist solutions to global warming when it is capitalism itself that has led us towards the current path of a climate catastrophe.

“One thing that I am very excited about is that I do believe that we have been able to influence a lot of thinking on climate and infrastructure,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an April interview with NPR. “As much as I think some parts of the party try to avoid saying ‘Green New Deal’ and really dance around and try to not use that term, ultimately, the framework I think has been adopted.”

Lindzen & Happer: "Crusaders will continue to retort that “the science is settled; it is time to act!” But real science is never settled, nor is scientific truth determined by consensus or political diktats. Agreement with observations is the measure of scientific truth." ... "The frenzy over climate resembles the medieval crusades against foreign infidels and home-grown heretics. There is even a children’s climate crusade." ... 

"We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders." ... 

"So far, climate crusaders have refrained from vilifying water vapor and clouds, which make the largest contribution to greenhouse warming of the earth. Carbon dioxide, demonized as “carbon pollution,” is an improbable villain." ... "More carbon dioxide is likely to cause some surface warming. But the warming would be small and benign. In fact, history shows that warmings of a few degrees Celsius — which extended growing seasons — have been good for humanity. The golden age of classical Roman civilization occurred during a warm period. Cooling periods, which were accompanied by barbarian invasions, famines, and plagues, have been bad. Neither contemporary observations nor the geological record support computer-based claims that CO2 is the “control knob” for the earth’s climate." 

Biden's planned tax increases to pay for his infrastructure bill will amount to the largest tax increase since 1968.