The Week's Worst Climate Stories (Bond Villains and Polar Bears?)

How many failures can they endure and keep going on?

Restoration News has brought you weekly updates on ugly, bizarre, and inexplicable stories about climate for some time now, and we won’t stop any time soon. It’s our mission to bring you the craziest headlines so you can understand how far off the deep end they’ve gone. We correctly predicted that the stories would get even more hysterical as the year advanced toward Election Day 2024. As the calendar turns to March, the climate stories have already advanced to ideas that threaten the very existence of humanity.

As I put it in my groundbreaking report on junk climate science, America doesn’t have a “climate crisis,” we have a crisis of lying about climate.

This week’s worst news items stand out as particularly mendacious examples. Perhaps it’s just been a slow news week, and the absurd climate stories stand out more. Or perhaps the cynicism has gotten overwhelming in its ubiquity. Whatever the reason, this week’s stupid climate tricks seem much more… brazen. Normally, there’s at least some science-y sounding explanation for the ridiculous solutions proposed for the problems they hysterically decry, but this week’s solutions seem a lot more dangerous, with no attempt to even give the appearance of grounding them in reality.

Despite all that, we actually have a couple of good news items, so stick around to the end—if you can make it that far!

Another Week, Another EV Carmaker Exits the Market—Actually, Three of Them

This week saw several stories of EV manufacturers abandoning the technology. This on the heels of the Biden administration quietly moving the deadline for getting the American market to 50% EVs last week. Mercedes Benz, Ford, and Apple (?!) all announced they would exit the EV market. Mercedes Benz backed off its 2021 proclamation to become all-electric by 2030, now saying it will get to “around 50%” by 2030. Give or take. This after Ford Motor Company completely halted shipments of its F-150 Lightning pickup trucks, so it could perform “quality checks.” In a stunning coincidence, Ford also began shipping its gas-powered 2024 F-150 pickups, after an unexplained delay.

Finally, did you know Apple Inc. was trying to develop an EV? Emphasis on the word “trying.” This week, they stopped trying. According to Bloomberg, “Apple Inc. is canceling a decadelong effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company. Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public.” Investors celebrated by sending Apple’s stock prices significantly higher.

The Vital Emission in Ukraine

They really do think you’re too stupid to see what they’re doing.

London, England has what it calls its ULEZ—Ultra-Low Emissions Zone, first implemented on London streets in 2020. It’s a big government scheme that charges drivers £12.50 per day if they drive a non-compliant vehicle anywhere in the city. The tax scheme has raised hundreds of pounds annually since its implementation. That money, in turn, funds a “scrappage” program. Much like the infamous “Cash for Clunkers” boondoggle introduced in America by President Obama, drivers of non-compliant vehicles can turn them in to the government for a tax-funded payout. The government will then dispose of these dirty, dirty vehicles by sending them to the junkyard, thereby removing their future emissions from our atmosphere.

Except when one woke idea intersects with another woke idea—after all, intersectionality eliminates emissions from the equation.

Now, leftist London mayor Sadiq Khan has revised the program to allow these dirty, dirty vehicles to be donated to Ukraine. Whether the emit planet-warming “greenhouse gases” in Ukraine, or fail to produce future GHGs altogether, is immaterial. They won’t be producing them in London, allowing Mayor Khan to take a victory lap either way.

As energy industry expert David Blackmon writes, “Khan, who makes a habit of berating and demonizing anyone who questions the ‘science’ of climate alarmism, is not quoted anywhere in this story as specifying what scientific basis he is relying upon to support his apparent belief that emissions matter less if they come from a country that has been invaded by Vladimir Putin’s Russian Army.”

Leticia James Is Feeling Froggy

Fresh off her inexplicable victory against Donald Trump for conducting business in New York City, the ultra-woke Attorney General of New York has fixed her sights on a new target: Meat.

This is the same woman who has aggressively pursued the private activities of not just Donald Trump, but the NRA, Citibank, AT&T, cryptocurrency companies, and any other corporation that crosses her. Judging by the results of the Trump trial, It likely won’t matter how much evidence exists that cattle contribute almost nothing to greenhouse gas emissions. Her political ambitions include the destruction of entire industries disfavored by the deep blue bicoastal elites. Hypocrisy, of course, doesn’t matter in that world, even if James reveals herself as living high on the hog in her fancy position, flush with campaign cash to pay for her lavish lifestyle. Of course, one has to wonder how many top-end steakhouses she frequents, but that’s none of our business.

Seriously, if you do business in New York, GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN.

Real-Life Bond Villains Work for the Green Left

In the James Bond movie franchise, Agent 007 fights a never-ending series of supervillains hell-bent on taking over the world, often hoping to do so by exterminating much of the human race in the process. Christopher Walken makes for a representative sample of the type in A View To A Kill, playing the maniacal computer mogul Max Zorin. Zorin wants to destroy the entire Silicon Valley in a devastating earthquake, killing millions and leaving him with a monopoly in the microchip market.

Of course, this doesn’t compare to the green energy zealots who want to change the world for good, not evil. Right?

These two headlines call that assumption into question:

Live Science: Scientists say dehydrating the stratosphere could be plausible option to combat climate change

Wall Street Journal: Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet

According to Live Science, NOAA scientists are considering “dehydrating” a part of the stratosphere, “just in one little place,” to let out some of the infrared radiation that gets absorbed by water vapor. The idea is to let some of the heat trapped by the atmosphere escape into space. The scientists they quote assure us the side effects would be “small,” despite the details remaining “fuzzy.”

Meanwhile, the WSJ has floated ideas that, on the surface, seem completely insane. Scientists, however, assure us we need to get a little crazy to save the globe:

Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing.

These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. 

International supervillains and scientists with a tenuous grasp on reality share one quality: the side effects and unintended consequences don’t matter nearly as much as succeeding in their nutty plans. We should reject both, for the same reason.

Time For A Periodic Warning About Polar Bears

Ever notice that bad polar bear news only comes around every so often? Maybe this is speculation, but it seems like that may be the case because it’s so easy to debunk the lies about polar bear population biology, so the hysterics only trot it out every so often when we’ve forgotten about their plight.

Anyhoo, here we go again.

A new peer-reviewed study claims polar bears don’t like longer summers. They got it published in a scientific journal despite the study following a grand total of 20 polar bears:

More time stranded on land means greater risk of starvation for polar bears, a new study indicates. During three summer weeks, 20 polar bears closely observed by scientists tried different strategies to maintain energy reserves, including resting, scavenging and foraging. Yet nearly all of them lost weight rapidly: on average around 1 kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, per day.

Nowhere in this—reminder, peer-reviewed—article do the authors indicate whether this weight loss is normal. Which seems like an important detail.

Hey, did you know there’s an entire blog dedicated to polar bear science? It’s called PolarBearScience.com. There, anyone can learn anything they ever wanted to know about the life cycle, evolution, and population dynamics of the beloved polar bear. At Polar Bear Science, if you search the term “longer summers,” you get a long list of articles debunking the myths about polar bears and their inability to adapt to variable times on land during warm weather.

This is no internet troll putting out these articles. The founder of Polar Bear Science is Susan Crockford, a zoologist and professor with over 40 years of study in Arctic animals and several published books to her credit.

As Crockford notes, as of 2013, the global population of polar bears had increased by a significant margin since 2001. The evidence that climate has imperiled polar bears simply doesn’t exist.

Finally, Some Good News

Despite all the doom mongering, there was some good news—even aside from the automakers exiting the EV manufacturing grift.

First, a prominent climate scientist at Cambridge University in the UK has published a new book, titled, Climate Change Isn’t Everything. Dr. Mike Hulme believes human activity contributes to global warming, and humanity should prepare for more heat waves, but he also denounces “climatism,” which he described in an op-ed:

The recurring trope of “time is short” feeds a discourse of scarcity in the public politics of climate change. Future climate is understood only in terms of a threshold, a “point of no return”, after which political action becomes “too late” . . .

This deadline-ism has worrying political and psychological implications. If time is short, then any action will do, as long as it reduces emissions. Not surprisingly, making time appear scarce leads to short-term thinking. Everything must be conducted in a hurry. It leads to narrow thinking and psychological anxiety. Doing whatever it takes without consideration of wider consequences has dangerous political ramifications.

One final bit of good news: the rooftop solar industry could be on the verge of “collapse,” according to Time Magazine:

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie. In part, that’s due to higher interest rates than the industry has ever had to face. In addition, recent legislative changes in California reduce the amount of money that homes can earn from sending power back to the grid, making solar less appealing financially; other states are following California’s lead.

Time also noted how many homeowners have been scammed by door-to-door salesmen for such programs, so the end of this era can’t come soon enough.