Links tagged “mkey”
- Climate activist in Forbes Mag: ‘Lock in lifestyle changes brought about by COVID-19’ to battle ‘climate crisis’ – ‘If a deadly virus changed our lifestyle at Warp Speed, why can’t a deadly climate crisis do the same?’
Cleantech venter capitalist Wal van Lierop in Fobes Mag: "We have discovered that worldwide lifestyle changes are possible and have a massive impact on emissions. ... If a deadly virus changed our lifestyle at Warp Speed, why can’t a deadly climate crisis do the same? ... Let’s lock those changes in to reduce commuter pollution. ... While we’re at it, let’s ensure that business travel never returns to its former excesses. Most of the time, there’s no reason to take one-day trips across the globe. Regular business meetings can be done more efficiently virtually, complemented by in-person contact only once in a while."
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- Wrong Again: 2020’s Failed Climate Doomsaying
As it turns out, climate doomsayers weren’t seeing so 20-20 when it came to 2020.
- UN Chief: ‘I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries’ – COVID Lockdowns to Morph into Climate Lockdowns?!
(Reuters) - World leaders should declare states of “climate emergency” to spur faster cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Saturday at a summit marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate accord. ... “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Guterres said via video. “That is why today, I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” ...
Guterres said economic recovery packages launched in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic should represent an opportunity to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future - but said this was not happening fast enough.
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- Watch: Al Gore: ‘This is the time for a Great Reset’ – ‘This is a time for a reset to fix a bunch of challenges, first among them the climate crisis’
Al Gore on June 19, 2020 on NBC's Today Show: " I think this is a time for a Great Reset. We've got to fix a lot of these problems that have been allowed to fester for way too long, and the climate crisis is an opportunity to create tens of millions of new jobs and clean up the air. reduce the death rate from pandemics -- by the way -- because the air pollution from burning fossil fuels heightens the death rates from coronavirus. So this is a time for a reset to fix a bunch of challenges first among them the climate crisis."
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30 Key Quotes Supporting the Anti-Capitalism ‘Great Reset’ by World Leaders
- 30 Key Quotes Supporting the Anti-Capitalism ‘Great Reset’ by World Leaders
“This is a big moment. The World Economic Forum … is really going to have to play a front and center role in refining the Great Reset to deal with climate change and inequity—all of which is being laid bare as a consequence of COVID-19.” – John Kerry
“This is the time for a Great Reset.” – Al Gore
“The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.” – António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations
- JunkScience.com’s collection of climate activists admitting climate is not about — the climate
- Energy and Race: The Media’s New Intersectionality – ‘Before Trump, Republicans were losing the energy war by not fighting it’
Rupert Darwall: Before Trump, Republicans were losing the energy war by not fighting it. “Our security, our prosperity, and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil,” President George W. Bush declared in January 2008. The transition from the Bush to the Obama presidency was well-nigh seamless in this regard. “We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy,” President Obama said in his first address to Congress.
- ‘The Green New Deal has at its core an impossibility in physics’ – USA to swap energy independence for dependence on China & Russia
MARK P. MILLS: "The staggering quantity of stuff that needs to be mined in order to build all the green machines...the invisible elephant in the room with a Green New Deal, whether implemented by federal or state governments, is the staggering quantity of stuff that needs to be mined in order to build all the green machines, and where that mining and processing happens...The monetary, environmental and geopolitical costs of energy technologies all derive from nature’s constraints.
And the physics of all energy sources, whether wind and sun or oil and gas, share the same core features. All exist in nature, for free. But that’s irrelevant. One has to pay landowners (private or governmental) to access locations where useful resources are located. Then one purchases machines, built from materials extracted from the earth, in order to convert any resource into a form that can be delivered to people. Since all machines wear out, there is nothing truly “renewable” about any of them."
"The one million electric vehicles (EVs) now on U.S. roads (courtesy of billions of dollars in subsidies) account for just 0.5% of America’s cars but contain, for example, more cobalt than one billion smartphones. In general, fabricating a single EV battery, each of which weighs about 1,000 pounds, requires digging up roughly 500,000 pounds of materials. That’s more than a 10-fold increase in the cumulative quantity of materials (liquids) used by a standard car over its entire operating life...
The world is literally about to embark on the biggest increase in mineral and metal mining in history."
"But America has long been a hostile place to try and open new mines. Consequently, the U.S. is 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals and imports over half its needs for another 28...The net effect of a Green New Deal distills to replacing domestic energy production (and exports) of hydrocarbons with an unprecedented level of energy mineral imports."
"China, for example, supplies about 90% of rare-earths for the world. On the cobalt front, China has also quietly gained control over more than 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt refining, without which the raw ore is useless. Russia is a massive nickel producer...You don’t have to ban fracking to kill the industry; mandating the use of the alternatives has the same effect...If all that weren’t enough, there’s also the roughly 20 to 100-fold increase in land use that comes with using green machines to replace hydrocarbons. And, of course, there’s the mother’s milk of a Green New Deal, the trillions of dollars in subsidies, necessarily funded by increased costs and taxes for all consumers."
- 80 Terrible Things ‘Global Warming’ Will Apparently Cause
- It’s not about the climate: President of Ireland: Response to climate change should focus on principles of ‘redistribution, social consumption & social investment’
Michael D Higgins will today call for a new approach to economics that incorporates the “radicalism” of climate activism. Part of the worldwide response to climate change should be framed around the principles of “redistribution, social consumption and social investment”, the president will say. Mr Higgins will call for a new approach to economics, one that “combines the radicalism that is in the consciousness of climate activism” with the “consciousness of egalitarianism.
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One that “combines the radicalism that is in the consciousness of climate activism, with the consciousness of egalitarianism and the programmes of inclusion activists”. It should be “framed around the three implicit goals of welfare states: redistribution, social consumption and social investment and characterised by gender equality, income redistribution, a reconfigured social consumption,” he will say.
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Bill Gates & UN Launch New Climate Agenda – Seeks ‘to kick start a transformational decade’ of climate ‘action’
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."
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The Return of the Dead: Countering Species Extinction Claims – The most aggressive claims rest on shaky foundations’
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.
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CNN report buries this good news in paragraph 12 on polar bears: ‘They are doing quite well…Svalbard’s polar bear numbers do not appear to have decreased in the last 20 years’
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.
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Statistical politics: Prof. Mike Hulme on ‘politically charged’ climate baseline changes from 1961-1990 to 1991-2020: ‘In an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer’
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)."
