The Worst Climate Stories of the Week (Ethically Restricting Your Freedoms)
Ethics trump your liberties, but not when it comes to creating ecological disasters to save the climate.
Here at Restoration News, we have an entire research team. That team spends its time investigating things. Not gonna lie, it’s pretty cool. We’ve gotten pretty good at it, breaking lots of news, speaking to whistleblowers, and digging in on research items nobody else will examine. One subject has eluded us, however, no matter how hard we search. We just can’t seem to find any basic sense in the vast field of humanity’s effects on climate.
It’s all hysteria. And it keeps getting worse.
This week … my goodness … whew. The words are elusive.
(Don’t miss: TRUST SCIENTISM! SMASH CAPITALISM!)
In proof of God’s sense of humor, a hail storm destroyed acres and acres of a solar power field in Texas. A peer-reviewed study claims to show definitive proof that hydroelectric dams produce tons of greenhouse gases. Some European “ethics council” proved my theory that covid lockdowns were a dry run for climate lockdowns, by saying it may be necessary to restrict personal freedoms to fight climate change. Some guy in Colorado wants to build the largest airplane ever designed, to carry wind turbine blades—but there are several catches. The Klamath River dam breach ecological disaster just keeps growing. A climate extremist says the quiet part out loud about capitalism.
Deep breath. That was a lot to process.
But hey, there’s also some good news. Our friends at Just the Facts reveal the truth about coastal communities in the era of “sea level rise.” Sen. Kennedy made an absolute fool of a climate clown in a Senate hearing. And a former green energy executive admits his mistake in believing in the healing power of renewables.
We’re bringing home a Costco-sized tub of crazy this week. Let’s dive in.
Getting Electricity From the Sky Isn’t So Cheap and Easy In This Climate
Video emerged this week of the extensive damage done to a large solar energy field by a recent violent hail storm. The 3,300 acre Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Texas sustained heavy damage.
The destruction of the solar field prompted concerns by local citizens of possible toxic contamination by chemicals leaking from the mangled panels. The incident reminded Texans that natural gas, nuclear, and even coal power plants don’t sustain such damage when Texas weather happens.
Meanwhile, Texas is also home to huge “graveyards” of expired and obsolete wind turbine parts that outlived their useful lives and can’t be recycled. Some turbines also have to be replaced as soon as two years after installation, far sooner than their advertised 30-year lifespan.
Oh, and building those wind turbines? To paraphrase Roy Scheider in the movie Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger airplane.” A company called Radia wants to build an airplane longer than a football field to carry giant new wind turbine blades for larger-sized turbines. That’s because the new blades for the bigger new turbines are going to be so big they can’t be transported by train or by truck. The plane, purportedly bigger than the military’s C-5, will have the ability to land on “austere” landing strips, but will only carry two blades at a time. What’s the carbon footprint on that monstrosity?
Dams Cause Global Warming?
A recent sciency-sounding report made an extraordinary claim—apparently the authors found proof of hydroelectric dams causing global warming. The authors then use this “science” to justify their demands to decommission hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. The dams supposedly create as much greenhouse gas emissions annually as 400,000 gas cars. How did they figure that out? By using a computer simulation, of course!
There isn’t enough space in this column to poke all the holes in the argument they made, but you can read the report here if you’re curious. Here’s what stands out about this 29 page report: it’s not peer-reviewed. Nor does it appear in an academic journal. It was produced by a non-profit called Tell The Dam Truth (TTDT). TTDT has applied for 501(c)(3) status but does not yet have a determination letter. The report, compiled by a couple of PhD activists, relies on what they call the “All-Res” modeling tool that “calculates the total carbon footprint over the lifecycle of a dam.” The data inputs to this “model” conclude that sediments emit methane that makes it to the surface of the water, along with wild assumptions about the carbon footprint habitat loss, reservoir operations, and other effects.
Look, no serious scientist would accept this report as definitive. Regardless, watch for TTDT to start making it into the mainstream media. They’ll get quoted as some sort of authority on river science, because that’s how things work these days.
The Ecological Disaster of Dam Removal Keeps Getting Worse
The Cult of Scientism behind dam removal in that previous piece makes the Klamath River ecological nightmare all the more insulting. We’ve covered the Klamath River dam removal for several weeks now. It just keeps getting worse. This week, Siskyou County declared a state of emergency over water quality. The blame water degradation from the dam removal. Naturally occurring heavy metals, like arsenic and lead, have built up over many decades in sediments deposited behind the dams. Now that the environmentalists have started breaching the dams, those sediments have made it—all at once—into the river and onto the banks. State officials assure local residents that the “short-term impacts” will “diminish” over time. They say sediments will flush down the river or get deposited on the banks and “stabilize in place.”
As Henry David Thoreau once said, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
Clowns to the Left of Me, Ethicists to the Right …
A board of “expert advisers” established by German Law, called the Ethics Council, published an op-ed putting forth the case for climate lockdowns. The Ethics Council says, in order to fight global warming, if your actions as an individual “infringe unjustly” upon the welfare of future generations, why, then it means the government must step in to safeguard future generations by limiting your freedom now:
On grounds of justice, it can be morally required to contribute to measures to tackle climate change. If one’s own exercise of freedom interferes in an unjust manner with the freedom and welfare of others or of future generations, for example through consumption that is harmful to the climate, the authorities may intervene with restrictions of freedom.
Writing in typical authoritarian doublespeak (which the Germans have perfected over the generations), the Ethics Council says they don’t want to suspend democratic freedoms and processes. They do, however, encourage the government to provide the supportive framework conditions under which individuals can make choices on how to lead their lives.
Another op-ed written by an expert, this time in Time magazine, tells us capitalism can’t solve climate change. The reasons really aren’t important. The Swedish author praises the authoritarian regime of China. After all, the Chinese Communist Party creates efficiencies by owning all the companies allowed to do business there.
They aren’t even hiding their tyrannical motives behind thinly veiled language anymore. We need to stand up and make the moral case for liberty and capitalism, while we still can.
This Week’s Good Climate News—Yes, We Have Some
First, a palate cleanser to wash away all that unpleasantness.
Good to know all those experts are such experts.
This week’s question from Just Facts cuts through the BS of sea level rise.
What portion of Florida’s COASTAL population has relocated since Al Gore predicted in 1992 that most of Florida’s residents may be displaced by rising sea levels over the next several decades?
Correct Answer
Less than 1%Correct Answer Rate 98%
Tell Me More
In his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance,” U.S. Senator Al Gore (D-TN) claimed that “not long” after “the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated” because “of the rising sea level, due to global warming.” Since then, the COASTAL population of Florida has increased by about 61%. In the same book, Gore made a similar statement about Bangladesh’s population that turned out to be the exact opposite of what he wrote. Likewise, the Associated Press reported in 1989, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Also, the New York Times reported in a 1995 article about global warming and rising sea levels, “At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”
Documentation
Tony Heller wrote this week about people fleeing catastrophic sea level rise at their coastal cottages. He revealed 1.2 million people fled cold-weather states and moved to coastal states like Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia—just in the past year.
Finally, a green tech evangelist has seen the light. Brian Gitt, a twenty year veteran of clean tech, wrote a long guest essay about how wrong he was. Renewables won’t pay for themselves, the amount of green energy produced in America has gone down despite trillions in taxpayer funding, and oil and “fossil fuel” consumption continues to rise. His mea culpa even notes that power generation from wind turbines declined by 2% last year. That, despite an increase in the number of turbines. Check it out at Michael Schellenberger’s Substack here.
(READ MORE: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—and How to Stop It)
