The Week’s Worst Climate Stories (Dems Get Gassy for Thanksgiving)

Our weekly foray into the eco-Left

Welcome back from the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully you weren’t inundated by climate cultist scolds as you sat down to enjoy your turkey, stuffing, and football. If you were, it’s likely you heard lectures about meat, factory farms, and your appliances causing the earth to burn up before our eyes, and we set aside some prayers for your strength (just in case).

Since we got back from the holiday, a lot of breaking new stories reveal the hysteria has only ratcheted up. In fact, the COP28 meeting starts this week in Dubai, bringing the largest crowd of private jet-setting hypocrites together in the history of the UN Climate Change Conference, so the craziness NEXT week is going to be off the charts.

Don’t worry though, this week has more than enough to tide you over. We have Kamala Harris lecturing you about your gas stove out of one side of her mouth while taking a Turkey Day selfie in front of her gas stove on the other side; UN troops and university undergrads are coming for your meat; climate reporters say the quiet part out loud; and the city of Edmonton wasted HOW MUCH on electric buses they can’t use?

Plus, two bits of good news, as voters around the world keep on electing leaders who reject climate alarmism and the terrible public policies that follow.

But first, settle into the buffet and dine on some leftover crazy with us.

1. Climate Reporters Come Together to Celebrate Their Bias and Climate Activism

A recent confab at the Columbia School of Journalism brought together “thought leaders” from across the media landscape to hone their skills in killing off climate debate and scolding news consumers about saving the planet. According to a recent report, the co-founder of Covering Climate Now led a two-day media conference by telling reporters they had to cover climate change like an emergency, just like they covered COVID-19. For its part, Columbia “is leading the charge and challenging the way our climate is currently covered.”

The gist of the conference was to urge all reporters, regardless of beat, to become climate activists, and to “weave climate coverage into every other story.” The way Covering Climate Now describes itself, it sounds a lot like the not-unbiased ProPublica, the subject of a recent Restoration News exposé:

CCNow collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture — and to drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public. Mindful of the media’s responsibility to inform the public and hold power to account, we advise newsrooms, share best practices, and provide reporting resources that help journalists ground their coverage in science while producing stories that resonate with audiences.

So brace yourself. The mainstream media apparently isn’t liberal enough, and it’s about to get a lot more radical-activist up in here.

2. Morally, and Actually, Bankrupt: Edmonton EV Fleet

Amid much fanfare in 2020, the city of Edmonton, Alberta announced a brand-new fleet of electric buses for its transit system. The mayor made grand pronouncements that these buses are “super-efficient” and “particularly efficient financially” because the SIXTY new EV buses only cost $1 million each but they were totally cheaper to operate and maintain than diesel buses.

Three years later, almost all of them sit broken down in some bus garage. The city mechanics can’t repair them because the manufacturer, California-based Proterra, filed bankruptcy, and the mechanics can’t get replacement parts.

Edmonton also discovered the buses don’t perform as advertised, with significantly shorter ranges than Proterra told them, exacerbated by the cold Canadian temperatures. The costs just keep piling up, including millions in maintenance and labor, and hundreds of thousands to buy “battery blankets” to keep them warm.

3. Democrats Get Gas Over Thanksgiving

Such a heartwarming holiday, when Democrat elected officials gather their executive chefs and nutritional staffs into their kitchens to whip up a traditional American feast for a photo op. For instance, Kamala Harris, of Biden Harris administration fame, tweeted:

But wait, that sure seems to be a gas stove, the kind the EPA and other democrats have proposed banning “phasing out” because of global warming.

Some intrepid internet sleuths even brought together a montage of Democrats getting gassy:

We certainly hope these folks won’t suffer with natural gas for too much longer. They have important work to do.

4. UN and Uni Activists Obsess Over Your Meat

Two stories this week about activists at various levels obsessing about your meat consumption. First, Warwick University in the U.K. succumbed to a small number of vegan activists, who demanded the dining halls remove meat from their menus to save the planet. According to the Daily Mail, the student body of almost 30,000 students will be forced to go without meat and dairy after fewer than 1,500 students voted on a motion called, “plant-based Warwick to tackle the climate crisis: for a just transition.” The motion was backed a group called “Plant-Based Universities,” which describes itself:

We are a student-led campaign for all university catering facilities to transition 100% of their menus to plant-based in order to limit the university’s contribution to the climate and ecological emergency and shift public opinion in favour of a plant-based food system. This is a campaign by Animal Rising.

While students were reacting negatively to the vote they weren’t invited to participate in, the UN started a campaign to shame the United States for its “overconsumption” of beef. Again with the cow farts:

The UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) will publish its so-called global food systems’ road map during the upcoming COP28 climate summit in Dubai which will kick off on Thursday and extend nearly two weeks until mid-December. FAO’s first-of-its-kind document will recommend nations that “over-consume meat” to limit their consumption as part of a broader effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Bloomberg reported.

FAO is about to FAFO, as most Americans will tell them they can pry their cheeseburgers from their cold, dead hands.

Now For Some Good News: More Nations Elect Governments That Reject Climate Alarmism

Back in October, we celebrated when the House of Representatives finally elected a Speaker! As it turned out, he’s a climate realist. Not even a month later, overseas voters followed suit in two elections of major consequence. In Argentina, Javier Milei sent shockwaves throughout the Americas by winning that country’s presidency. Among many other market-friendly positions he’s staked out, Milei has called climate change a “socialist lie,” setting off the socialist liars on the radical Left. As John Nolte once noted many years ago, “Leftist tears taste like gumdrops.”

Then, Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) doubled down on the gumdrops by winning a plurality in the Dutch parliament, making him the new Prime Minister of the Netherlands. This is a seismic shock for a country that has seen huge protests of farmers, after the government promised to steal more than 30% of their land because of fertilizer pollution. The Netherlands has some of the most productive farmland in the world, and its economy and personal liberty came under direct attack by the globalists running its government. The people seem to have responded in kind.  The PVV platform says this about climate:

“We have been made to fear climate change for decades… We must stop being afraid,” says the PVV manifesto.

The Dutch have the best water engineers in the world and there is no need to panic about rising sea levels, the document says.

The manifesto calls for more oil and gas extraction from the North Sea and keeping coal and gas power stations open.

“The PVV is also in favour of rapidly constructing new nuclear power stations.”