The Week’s Worst Climate Stories (Drilling Oil with Green Energy?)

Green energy: Is there anything it can’t do? (Don’t answer that.)

The climate cultists are barreling full speed ahead towards utopia (Ed. note: “Nowhere”). And not a moment too soon, because global warming has started to speed up time. Just like Superman in that one movie. All we have to do is use solar power to run deep sea oil drilling, and we can save the planet. And if that doesn’t work, we can trust the scientists to just change our atmosphere by sucking out all the carbon dioxide.

Look, you’ll just have to trust us. These are real stories. We couldn’t make this stuff up.

This week, we have a whole lot of bad news about petroleum, so buckle up. Also, we have not one, but TWO stories about climate and time, for all you science fiction fans out there, PLUS a bonus geoengineering story. We have an entire nation plunging headlong into changing its economic system to fix the weather. In our Electric Vehicles (EVs) Can Do No Wrong segment this week, we have auto manufacturers returning to internal combustion, an EV mandate that will wreck the U.S. economy, and an exploding EV just for fun. And, yeah, there’s that one story about oil rigs needing to run on green energy to survive, because for these folks, cognitive dissonance is a feature, not a bug.

(Don’t Miss: Ethically Restricting Your Freedoms)

We have some good news this week, though, as states have begun fighting back against offshore wind projects. Plus, Restoration News has a new effort against the Orwellian attempt to hijack our language, called Language Watch. This week, we released our video on “Climate Change.”

Ok, time to wade through the swamps of doublespeak and junk science.

If I Could Turn Back Time …

“Climate change has been blamed for many dramatic effects on our planet and our lives,” NPR breathlessly begins, “now it may even affect the measurement of time.” A new study has discovered that climate change affects Earth’s rotation, which may require scientists to remove the “leap second” they had planned to add this year to make our clocks more precise. Apparently there are several decades’ worth of history of adding leap seconds to the year, after scientists noticed the earth was decelerating ever so slightly. Now, though, rotational speed seems to have increased again.

Experts blame global warming, naturally, because no other natural variables could possibly have intervened so obviously. And no, this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, as the discussion appeared in a peer-reviewed journal on an otherwise innocuous day.

Flashback: The Weather Fifty Years Ago Sucked Too

This week has seen severe storms across the Midwest, with tornadoes appearing from Ohio to Texas and many states in between. The headlines blared about storm frequency and intensity increasing due to global warming, of course. So it was enlightening to see an item looking back to April 3, 1974 and the “super outbreak” that produced damaging storms across several states. A deep cyclone over Kansas moved slowly northeast into Illinois over the course of the day. This system spawned a whopping 148 tornadoes in 24 hours from Mississippi to Ontario, Canada. These violent tornadoes killed 335 people and injured over 6,000. This was the second largest tornado outbreak ever. Reminder, 1974 was at the tail end of a mini-cooling period that lasted for about 30 years.

So when they tell you weather has gotten worse because of man-made global warming, tell them they can huff, and they can puff, but they can’t blow the truth down.

Bad News for Anyone Who Consumes Petroleum Products

Do you have products made of plastic? Computing devices? A vehicle? Clothing? Chances are, those and many other products contain something made out of petroleum. It’s kinda important. So two news items indicate higher prices and tighter supplies will arrive sooner than later.

First, OilPrice.Com reports more than 20 percent of the world’s oil refining capacity could close by 2030. They cite weakening profit margins and carbon taxes as one major threat, while declining demand and environmental regulations could further squeeze profits. Add it all together, and they list 121 out of 465 refineries at some risk of closing. That represents 20.2 million barrels per day of global refining productivity. In addition, a new refinery in Nigeria promises to produce that nation’s entire daily use and then some, putting more refined petroleum on the export market.

Of more immediate concern, when the Biden administration started tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) a couple years ago in a vain attempt to control gas prices, they promised to refill it over time when wholesale oil prices started coming down. Well, they waited, and waited, and waited, and now the SPR has deteriorated to its lowest level ever, with a paltry 17-day supply on hand.

Noting how important the SPR is to national security, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm assured the public she would get it refilled by the end of 2024. Instead, the Department of Energy quietly announced it would cancel its latest order due to high prices.

If only we had the domestic production capacity to refill our reserves at favorable prices—something the Democrats blocked President Trump from doing, when prices hovered at less than a third of today’s cost.

New Tax in Canada Will Fix the Weather

The federal carbon tax in Canada jumped on April 1, from $65 per ton to $80 per ton. That translates to 3.3 cents more per liter. Of course, drivers aren’t the only consumers paying the increase. Every transportation link in the supply chain pays it, and it adds up. That’s how prices on everything will spike, not just the price at the pump. The taxes also increased on “dozens” of other fuel sources that produce “greenhouse gas emissions,” like propane, natural gas, and others.

But surely the weather will thank Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by getting milder. Right?

When the New York Times Said Science’s Dead

No big deal, just the New York Times bragging about scientists monkeying around with the chemical composition of our atmosphere and our oceans.

What could go wrong?

Infusing clouds with sulfur dioxide to block the sun. Vacuuming carbon dioxide out of thin air. Adding iron to the ocean to draw greenhouse gases down to the sea floor. As recently as a few years ago, technologies designed to change Earth’s atmosphere — what is broadly known as geoengineering — were considered too impractical, too expensive and too outlandish to be taken seriously.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we shouldn’t object to these ideas because we consider them impractical. That’s a classic strawman argument, a common logical fallacy among the climate cultists. A much more direct objection is that we have no idea what the unintended consequences will be when we geoengineer the very nature of the world’s atmosphere, upon which all life relies.

But it’s an emergency, and the Cult of Scientism says we have to do something! As Arnold Schwarzenegger said about the COVID vaccine, “Screw your rights.”

This Week in Bad News for EVs

Several EV quick hits this week.

Buick is going Back! To the Future! David Blackmon writes over at his Substack about a new internal combustion SUV model on the market from Buick, while EV manufacturer Fisker tries desperately to avoid bankruptcy.

PJ Media’s Vodkapundit has this cheery little note about Biden’s new EV mandate on the trucking industry. “Say goodbye to the trucking industry as we know it, and goodbye to the American economy, too,” he wrote. “You might have missed it on Good Friday — which you can be sure was no accident — when the Biden EPA released its new tailpipe rules for semi-trucks, but the new rules will destroy how we move goods around the country.”

Now for a palate-cleanser: another EV exploded in someone’s garage:

Oil Rigs to Run on Green Energy—For the Climate

England produces and exports a significant amount of oil and natural gas from its North Sea operations. Now they’ve told the companies operating the oil rigs to run on green energy, or face shutdown of their operations. This new mandate could force operators to run power cables from land, or build wind farms near each platform to provide the energy to operate their petroleum extraction operations. Many of the older platforms would not have the ability to transition to electricity, or other “low carbon fuels.”

This, as you may have suspected, will have no effect whatsoever on carbon dioxide levels, and may even increase emissions. Its true aim, one suspects, is nothing short of shutting down any extraction of “fossil fuels” in the North Sea altogether.

Yes, Virginia, There Is Good Climate News

Save the Whales. Several groups and plaintiffs in Virginia have filed a lawsuit to stop a proposed offshore wind project due to its effects on endangered North Atlantic Right Whales. Plaintiffs want a biological impact analysis—not done for the Virginia project—on all of the Biden administration’s proposed wind farms, 30 gigawatts in total. As the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) reports:

This Dominion Energy project is but one of many massive offshore wind projects mandated by an executive order issued by President Biden on January 27, 2021, declaring that a “climate crisis” exists that “threatens mankind’s existence.” The Biden administration has given fast-track approval to dozens of wind projects off the East Coast, with the goal of producing 30 gigawatts of electricity by 2030.

In issuing its “biological opinion” in September, NMFS only examined the impact that each of these projects, individually and in isolation, would have on the North Atlantic right whale. The agency did not, as it should have, issue a comprehensive and cumulative analysis examining the combined harm that all of the projects, together, would inflict on the whales during their annual migration path.

Meanwhile, a bill in Florida awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) signature would ban offshore wind altogether in the state. DeSantis signing it into law seems like a foregone conclusion, since his office helped write the legislation. Florida would become the first state in the union to ban offshore wind production.

Finally this week, Restoration News is proud to launch our Language Watch series, helping average Americans fight back in the war on language the radical left has started. Their attempts to redefine words and phrases has an Orwellian quality to it, and we help you cut through the BS in short-form, digestible videos. Here’s our installment on “Climate Change.”

(READ MORE: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science)