The Week’s Worst Climate Stories (Net Zero Blues?)
We gather the stupidest, ugliest, and most bizarre global warming stories each week so you don’t have to.
Well, here we are again, gathered together for another week of crazy stories about climate hysteria. It seems the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan, as the old joke went in the Soviet Union. The more the EVs fail, or fall apart, or explode, the more the alarmists try to make green energy work. The more they spend on Net Zero goals, the more they lie about how much it costs to remove petroleum from our society. The more they rely on the peer-review process to prove their claims about carbon dioxide, the more the peer-review process itself loses credibility. (Wait ‘til you see this week’s story on THAT.)
(ALSO CATCH: Week’s Worst Climate Stories—Taylor Swift’s Boyfriend and… Green Tax Credits?)
We’re here to shine a light on all the worst stories, because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Even if common sense isn’t so common, most of us can see the folly of these pie-in-the-sky solutions and the junk science that doesn’t prove there’s a problem at all.
This week is no exception. We’ve got all sorts of stories that show the climate agenda fundamentally opposes human progress. Plus, in a couple of bits of good news, Mother Nature just keeps on thriving despite us, and the Biden administration’s push for green energy has hit more snags.
Go Net Zero, Go Broke
The British city of Birmingham was so concerned about global warming, they declared a “climate emergency” in 2019. They set goals to get to “net zero” by 2030, meaning they would remove more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere than they emitted. Birmingham’s plan was typical for such emergency declarations: public utilities, retrofitting public and private buildings, onerous new environmental regulations for new construction, “green” public transit and other municipal vehicles, and increased reliance on “green” energy like wind and solar.
Four years into their grand plan to save the globe, the city declared bankruptcy in September 2023. This week the city council started discussing a massive tax increase, a sell off of a huge amount of the city’s assets, and settlement of legal claims against the city over radically liberal spending policies.
This is the inevitable result of net zero goals, as we’ve seen time and time again. And yet governments keep trying to set these impossible goals, which inevitably cost the taxpayers ever more. Indeed, the British government now faces inquiries into its Climate Change Committee after economists warned net zero for the entire country will cost trillions of pounds more than they claimed.
Another report this week has British net zero goals taking even more body shots. University researchers demonstrated that the transition to net zero by the British government will most severely impact poor households, as low-income families cannot afford the expensive new equipment required in the transition.
No signs yet that the Brits will back off their radical net zero goals, despite all this disastrous economic news.
Peer Review This
A truly ridiculous story this week once again highlights the controversy surrounding peer-review of scholarly articles for scientific and academic journals, which serve as the gatekeepers for serious academic advancement.
Peer-review has earned the pejorative nickname of “pal-review” in recent years, owing to reviewers going light on article submissions in which the conclusions support the prevailing narrative on any given subject. An entire blog tracking retractions of bad scientific papers, Retraction Watch, has become very popular as it highlights the worst academic malfeasance in the academic journal world (read here for their explanation of why they exist). More coverage of fake papers pointing out the absurdity of the system are here and here.
This week saw a real whopper that incorporated the elements of artificial intelligence (AI), absurd illustrations, and rats with huge penises.
Deep, cleansing breath. Ok, here we go.
The journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology published a paper claiming to track sperm stem cells in rats. It included AI-generated illustrations of a rat with an unrealistically large penis and four testicles, and fake labels of parts that don’t exist. Other AI-generated illustrations described non-existent cellular processes.
The journal has issued a retraction, but it has raised serious questions how the article got approved in the first place.
When Batteries Aren’t Exploding, They’re Burning Cash
In a small French town, 900 tons of spent lithium batteries at a recycling plant spontaneously combusted, sending huge clouds of toxic smoke around the region.
Meanwhile, a guy in Seattle recently bought a used 2015 BMW i3 EV and found out he had to replace the battery. He took it to the dealership, and then in his shock, posted the repair bill to the internet—all $71,208.27 of it.
The secondary market for used EVs might just take a hit in light of these stories.
Here Comes the Sun, Doo-doo-doo-doo…
Solar farms installed in recent years face reduced life spans, for a very ironic reason.
The sun.
We’ve already seen reports that U.S. solar infrastructure ages faster than the promised 25-year lifespan—with power inverters lasting 10–15 years. Complicating matters, many of the companies that produced the older power inverters (back under the Obama administration) have gone out of business. Industry experts have said the solar farms will have to repair lots of these components in the next few years, adding significant expense to the projects.
Making matters even more absurd than that, Australia has now learned that their relatively higher heat leads to rapid degradation of the solar panels. This will lead to power loss and increased expense for power, the longer the grid relies on them.
In other words, putting the solar panels in the sun makes them go bad faster. Who would have guessed?
How to Serve Man—a Handbook
In the classic sci-fi story from the 50s, that Rod Serling adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone, an advanced race of aliens comes to Earth with a book called How to Serve Man. It turns out they didn’t come here to perform galactic community service, it’s actually a cookbook.
In a similar vein, radical Marxists quoting Critical Theory and climate radicalism have published a new book:
In the X/Twitter thread, the editor lauds the contributions by all sorts of radical scholars, saying, “What emerges is a rich diversity of viewpoints and perspectives.” The thread reveals, despite his claims of disagreements on several essential questions, a unity in anti-Western, pro-Marxist, and anti-development philosophies. Human progress is to be shunned as we reject modern human advances like running water, capitalism, and other forms of human growth.
The entire thread is worth a read for the radical anti-free market babble, like: “We mean degrowth’s potential to shape social struggles, academic debate, and practice in areas including urban planning, agriculture, architectural design, psychoanalysis, revolutionary struggle, and policymaking (we mean it when we say unidisciplinary!).”
Or this one: “Some contributions are critical of degrowth, some synthesize degrowth with perspectives including Marxism, Feminism, and non-Western thought, some critique other traditions of theory and practice including Marxism and eco-modernism through degrowth.”
See, a diversity of perspectives, so long as you don’t espouse the positive aspects of modern human existence or mutually beneficial financial transactions.
As we always like to say, when they tell you what they want to do, take them seriously.
Finally, Some Good Climate News
As we reported previously here at Restoration News, the doomsayers have gotten everything about coral bleaching wrong, and climate change hasn’t killed off Earth’s great reefs. A new research project has backed that up by examining satellite imagery, definitively showing more coral reef area across the globe than previously thought.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration quietly announced a delay in its mandates for more EVs on the domestic auto market. According to the New York Times, the administration made the announcement as a favor to the United Auto Workers union and auto executives. It also might have had something to do with EV demand dropping so fast, entire mines have shut down. Development of manufacturing plants has slowed down or halted, like the Albermarle plant in South Carolina.
(READ MORE: HOW THE LEFT’S GLOBAL WARMING IDEOLOGY WRECKED SCIENCE—AND HOW TO STOP IT)
