Like the man said, you can’t make this stuff up.
Donald Clark (no flags, no hashtags)
@DonaldClark
COP [UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26)] coming to Glasgow. Leaders staying at Gleneagles Hotel & 20Tesla cars (£100K each) bought to ferry them 75km back & forth. Gleneagles has 1 Tesla charging station, so Malcolm Plant Hire contracted to supply Diesel Generators to recharge Tesla’s overnight. Couldn’t make it up.
Wow.
President Joe Biden (D) wants to make climate change a matter of government regulation in our nation’s financial sector.
Calling climate change a systemic risk to the financial system, the White House will release a report Friday outlining its strategy for new rules that could affect investment disclosures, insurance policies and home loans.
And
[T]he US needs “a road map for measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risk across the economy.”
No. To the extent global warming (let’s stop hiding behind euphemisms) is a risk to our nation’s financial system, it’s a risk best handled by those who are actually expert in handling risk and the impact of risk to us citizens: our financial institutions operating in a free market, and us citizens making our own decisions regarding the risks each of us individually choose to run or not run and the impact of those risks on our individual lives.
Government can only make one-size-fits-all moves, whether nationally or regionally—it cannot tailor its moves down to the level of individual businesses, much less down to the individual.
Gina McCarthy, White House National Climate Advisor, rationalized:
This road map isn’t about protecting our financial system. It’s about protecting people, their paychecks, and their prosperity[.]
Again, no. This “road map” has nothing to do with that. In the first place, we don’t need protection beyond what we can, and should, do for ourselves in a free market. In the second place, it isn’t Government’s role to protect us from the vagaries of free markets; Government’s role is only to provide a stable economic environment in which our free market can operate. Government does that best with minimal regulation, minimal intrusion, into our markets.
[L]ife is always full of tough choices and the relationship between nations. That was John Kerry answering David Westin, a Bloomberg Television anchor, who asked Kerry, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?” Kerry actually said that in all seriousness regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s prioritizing global warming over the People’s Republic of China’s genocide against Uyghurs.
Never mind that the Uyghurs are being murdered today, and even if Climatistas are right, nobody dies for generations under the warming.
But Kerry wasn’t done.
The point I’m making is that even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them [Gorbachev and his Soviet Union] out on it, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests[.]
Never mind, either, that the Soviets—the Russians—were pushing serfdom, slavery. Serfs, slaves, however horrific their lives, are in fact alive and have a chance of escaping, of getting help to escape, their condition. The dead have no such opportunity.
This is what the Biden-Harris administration appoints and supports.
That’s John Kerry’s claim and goal as he stated at the recent, pretentiously styled, Leaders Summit on Climate.
Net zero is not enough. We need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
There are two interpretations for Kerry’s claim.
One is that he meant complete removal, which would have the effect of starving to extinction all plant life, and from that all life on Earth.
The other interpretation is that he meant removal of “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere. He—and climatistas everywhere—decline to define “excess” in any concrete, measurable terms.
Either interpretation represents Kerry’s utter dishonesty. Dishonesty, I claim, because I don’t believe Kerry, the self-proclaimed Smartest Man in the Room, is that ignorant or that stupid.
The headline of a Wall Street Journal piece regarding the Amazon forest, its putative role in Earth’s climate, and Brazil says it all: Brazil’s Climate Overture to Biden: Pay Us Not to Raze Amazon. The article’s lede lays it out in crystalline terms.
Brazil’s government, widely criticized by environmental groups as a negligent steward of the Amazon rainforest, has made an audacious offer to the Biden administration: provide $1 billion and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration will reduce deforestation by 40%.
The article closed with a question for readers:
Should the US give the Bolsonaro government in Brazil $1 billion to slow deforestation in the Amazon?
No, I say. No, in spades.
Here’s my counteroffer to Bolsonaro: slow deforestation of the Amazon by 50%, and we won’t cut our imports of Brazilian goods and services by $1 billion. End your deforestation by 2030—your proposed goal—and we’ll continue, after that date, to import Brazilian goods and services at rates consistent with market demand.
Here are the Brazilian terms starkly articulated by Bolsonaro’s Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles:
If we don’t give these people this economic support, they will continue to be co-opted or incentivized by illegal activities.
Cute. Those are “activities” the Brazilian government condones with its own passivity. Hence the Bolsonaro/Salles threat: “Nice forest you guys got here. Be too bad if something was to happen to it. Be better if you was to pay up.”