The Week’s Worst Climate Stories (EVs Are The Gift That Keep On Taking)
John Kerry Must Be Taking The Same Meds Joe Biden Is On, Because … Whew.
At this point in our journey through climate alarmism and Pollyanna proclamations about green energy, the stories of exploding, failing, and unwanted electric vehicles (EVs) have become so ubiquitous, they’ve earned a permanent segment in our weekly column about climate absurdities.
This week, Joe Biden decided to show he can pivot to getting tough on illegal immigration by going to the border and calling “climate deniers” names. Meanwhile, the Sierra Nevada mountains got a gargantuan, drought-reversing amount of snow again, young voters wouldn’t even pay $10 to help the climate, and—wouldn’t ya know it—global warming causes cold snaps! The excess heat must have caused the twenty foot snow drifts in California.
Did you miss last week’s column? The Week’s Worst Climate Stories (Bond Villains and Polar Bears?)
To top it all off, more reports have emerged that local governments just don’t want what green energy is selling, which gives us our good news item of the week.
Up first, however, John Kerry said something so stupid, even the Left will start getting sick of his hot air—you’d think, anyway.
John Kerry: If Russia Opened Up About Climate, Maybe People Would Like Them
Whatever you think about Ukraine, it seems generally true that most of the world disapproves of Russia’s invasion, and thinks Vladimir Putin is little more than a thug. Noted crisis communications expert and armed forces supporter John Kerry has some deep thoughts on how to fix Putin’s international image.
If Russia wanted to show good faith, they could go out and announce what their reductions are going to be and make a greater effort to reduce emissions now. And maybe that would open up the door for people to feel better about what Russia is choosing to do at this point in time.
Serious question: Is there anyone in the Biden administration that can string together a coherent thought that isn’t completely offensive to most of the world? Anyone?
This Week in EV Disasters
So many bad news items about EVs this week, so few lines in this column…
Aston Martin, the iconic luxury sports car company popularized by James Bond, decided to delay its EV model until at least 2026, due to a prominent lack of demand.
The UK got a second dose of bad EV news, as the government issued an urgent recall of 1,758 electric buses across the island nation that could “burst into flames.” The buses go for a cool £450,000, putting the total value of the recalled vehicles somewhere around £800 million. The buses contain batteries from Chinese manufacturer BYD.
This on the heels of the report in the Wall Street Journal that EVs produce significantly more particulate pollution than gas-powered vehicles, a fact California tried to conceal from the federal government when it implemented its 2035 gas vehicle ban.
On top of that, a new report by the American Transportation Research Institute demonstrated how much electrifying all U.S. vehicles would cost. Actually, they couldn’t even reveal it because the technology doesn’t exist at the scale needed. America would need to produce 40% more electricity than we do now, the weight of electric long-haul trucks would reduce the amount of cargo they’d be able to carry, and we’d need 35 years of mining at current capacity to have sufficient rare earth minerals for all those batteries.
It Snowed In the Sierras… a LOT
This past weekend, a big snow storm hit the mountains of California. How big? Some parts got up to twelve feet. Not inches—twelve feet. This transformed near-drought conditions in California, putting their annual snow pack over 100% of average and refilling all the reservoirs.
This image was taken at the Palisades Tahoe parking lot on March 5:
Here’s another one from the Kirkwood Ski Resort:
All That Snow Caused By Global Warming, Of Course
Over at The Conversation, whose actual tagline is actually, “Academic rigor, journalistic flair,” a senior physics researcher at Oxford tells us all that snow is caused by global warming. Because the climate is a static system, according to warmers, any disruption is unnatural and therefore due to human inputs into this incredibly complex climatic system we have on Earth.
No, it couldn’t possibly be due to natural cycles, or one of thousands of unaccounted variables, nope. Their mathematical models are far more accurate than your lying eyes, and definitively accuse mankind of screwing it all up.
Here’s her explanation:
Some of these cold snaps are linked to disruptions in a seasonal atmospheric phenomenon called the stratospheric polar vortex (SPV).
In the northern hemisphere, this vortex consists of masses of cold air centred over the north pole, surrounded by a jet of very strong westerly winds between 15-50km above ground. These spinning winds act as a wall and keep cold air confined to the Arctic region, stopping it from travelling to lower latitudes.
Something that can disrupt the vortex is a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), when the stratosphere experiences an abrupt increase in temperature due to energy and momentum being transferred from lower to higher altitudes. When a major SSW occurs, the wall of strong winds around the polar stratosphere can break, allowing cold air to escape the polar vortex and travel down to lower atmospheric altitudes and lower latitudes. When that air approaches the Earth’s surface, significant cold spells can occur.
Sounds very science-y, doesn’t it? Of course, it’s got 100% to do with human CO2 emissions and nothing else, because solar activity and variances in the planet’s solar orbit couldn’t possibly affect the amount of energy in our environment. Just ask the elephants Hannibal used to cross the Alps during the Roman Warm Period.
Oh, wait.
Biden Pivots to Border Crisis By Calling Climate Deniers ‘Neanderthals’
Because of course he did.
Joe Biden went to the border last week to make it look like he cares about the invasion his policies have caused. He used the photo op to talk tough … about climate change?
In talking about the massive wildfire in the Texas panhandle, Biden said:
I have flown over many of these fires since I’ve been president. Matter of fact, I’ve flewn [sic] helicopter in the west and the southwest and northwest. Flown over more land burned to the ground. All the vegetation gone, and the entire state of Maryland, the square footage. The idea there’s no such thing as climate change, I love that, man. I love some of my Neanderthal friends who still think there’s no climate change. Well my administration is gonna keep building on the progress we’ve made fighting climate crisis and we gonna keep help folks rebuild themselves in the wake of these disasters. And we rebuild to the standards that are the up to date standards of the building codes and the rest.
Can’t Spare a Sawbuck for the Climate
The Daily Mail revealed a new poll, in which only 45 percent of voters aged 18-34 would be willing to spend $10 or less per month to combat climate change, with 20 percent saying they wouldn’t pay anything to help. Across all age brackets, 58 percent of voters say they wouldn’t pay more than $10 per month to fight climate change.
Bidenomics, man, am I right?
Finally, a Bit of Good Climate News—A Revolting Development
If you’ll pardon the pun, it seems each week we see new stories about governments and consumers revolting against the narrative by rejecting green energy and climate solutions. In an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph, David Blackmon recently commented on a “rising movement by local governments in the United States” to refuse permit applications for wind and solar production. He took pains not to refer to them as “wind and solar farms,” instead preferring the more accurate term, “industrial sites.”
Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood.
He makes an important point about the proper use of language, and why we should refuse to fall for the false premises of the radical left.
