The Worst Climate Stories of the Week (Everything Exploding Everywhere All At Once)

This week has seen an even greater proliferation of implosions and explosions in “climate friendly” green energy than we’ve become accustomed to. Undaunted, the Biden administration presses on regardless.

Even Mother Nature has clapped back on climate action, but Biden and his merry band of envirowackos continue to ignore the clear signs she sends them. Heck, even organized science has started to pump the brakes.

We’re here with all the popcorn, just continuing to watch the show.

Dont miss last week’s column: I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Moon

This week, we have never-ending lithium electric vehicle (EV) battery fires (again), an EV carmaker announcing layoffs (again), EVs come back with a sub-optimal safety record (again), EV tires wear out way faster than gas-guzzlers (again), EV batteries wear out far earlier than their warranty states (again), Mother Nature destroying wind farms (again), and child plaintiffs recruited to sue the government by radical NGOs (again).

The stories may be redundant, but they also mean job security in the enviromocking industry. The EV grab bag by itself will keep the columns rolling as long as Biden continues to subsidize them.

On top of all that, we also have the true costs of the Biden climate agenda—if you guessed they would increase far more than estimated, you win a prize! Science itself took a hit, as a shocking number of academic papers had to be retracted because they contained fraud and nonsense.

In good news, several states have banded together (again) to sue blue states over onerous environmental regulations. Plus, even a meteorologist who champions the theory of global warming has put the brakes on the Biden administration and the media, and how the fear they peddle does more harm than good for their movement.

Let’s get to it.

EV Grab Bag

There are so many bad news headlines for EVs this week, it’s easier just to give a summary.

A fire in a San Diego, CA area warehouse has smoldered for weeks, with no end in sight. This fire started spontaneously among a large load of EV batteries awaiting distribution. Firefighters say the lithium-ion batteries overheated and caused a thermal runaway. Despite water interacting with the mineral components of the battery to produce more heat, they don’t have any other firefighting material in sufficient quantities. This leaves them in the unenviable position of having to use insane amounts of water to keep the temperature down, and hoping it burns itself out without spreading. This event caused residents and officials in San Diego, New York City, and other locales to express concern about new battery storage warehouses in their communities.

A new study shows EVs hate pedestrians. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study showing pedestrians are twice as likely to be hit by an EV than by a gas-powered car, due to the lower noise produced by the EV.

Yet another article appeared this week highlighting how soon new EV owners must replace the tires—within 3,000 miles of driving it off the lot—adding astronomical costs to an already expensive proposition.

This week, another EV manufacturer announced layoffs, demonstrating growing weakness in the industry.

Another week, another story about EV batteries not making it to the end of the manufacturer’s warranty. Even Tesla batteries conk out after three years. 

Mother Nature Shows Her Displeasure With Green Energy

Heavy spring storms have rolled across the heartland the past few weeks. We’ve seen huge solar farms taken out by hail, wind farms flattened by tornadoes, and now a wind mill in Virginia got struck by lightning, setting it on fire and destroying it.

Soros-backed Nonprofit Dupes More Children Into Climate Suits

The law firm Our Children’s Trust has bankrolled lawsuits in Oregon, Montana, Hawaii, and other states. Using funding from George Soros and other radical donors and foundations, they have expanded their effort into Alaska. Their cynical strategy includes recruiting naïve plaintiffs under 18 years of age to gin up sympathy. They then join a class action that claims the defendant state has failed to protect their constitutional right to a future that doesn’t include climate change.

Now, Our Children’s Trust has found a new target—a natural gas pipeline in Alaska, a state rich with natural resources that help fund its economy:

A youth group in Alaska is holding the state accountable for agreeing to a huge gas export project that is expected to triple the region’s planet-warming pollution output for years to come. 

The $38.7 billion Alaska LNG Project would bring a gas treatment plant to Alaska’s North Slope, with the resulting gas set to be sent to Asia.

Worth noting again: Alaska is home to an enormous petroleum and natural gas extraction industry. Shutting down pipelines makes transportation of these products significantly less safe, when done by truck or train. But this is all part of the Leave it in the Ground movement that wants to halt all “fossil fuel” extraction immediately, with no regard to any consequences. Exploiting children to advance this movement is a great way to get passionate support without regard to those consequences.

Believe It or Not, the Biden Admin Misrepresented the Costs of the Green New Deal

You’d better sit down for this one.

Joe Biden may not have been entirely truthful about the costs of his Green New Deal policies. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) released a report this week blasting new green regulations. The report says new rules will add 33,138 pages of new rules and over a trillion dollars in extra costs. In a statement, Comer said, “The Biden Administration weaponized the power of the executive branch to wage a war against American-made energy production and cement in place radical, far-left energy policies that jeopardize domestic energy development, overload America’s power grid, and raise costs on all American consumers and businesses.”

Science Can’t Seem To Support Itself

In a dubious world record you don’t want to set, 2023 saw a record number of peer-reviewed studies retracted. According to the academic journal Nature, “The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud.” They cited Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China as having the the highest retraction rates over the past two decades. Some of the fraud is driven by AI-driven “paper mills” that crank out phony studies. More ominously, some of it resulted from breakdowns in the integrity of peer review itself. This serves as a sobering reminder of the corruption that can happen even in the halls of our scientific institutions. Hard to “trust the science” when it faces such a crisis in confidence.

Now for some good news . . .

Red States Strike Back Against Blue State Climate Insanity

The Daily Caller reported that nineteen Republican state attorneys general sued five blue states. They claim those states “illegally attempt[ed] to impose aggressive climate policies on the rest of the country.”

The coalition of red states filed the challenge with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, alleging that the five blue states — California, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota — are trying to advance an anti-fossil fuel agenda for the entire country via tools like climate nuisance lawsuits against oil companies. The coalition of red states requested that the Supreme Court step in to determine whether these Democrat-controlled states can effectively interfere in other states’ energy policy.

More, please!

Global Warming Supporter Slams Buttigieg’s Climate Claims

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg did an interview with CBS News on Sunday. Buttigieg said the violent turbulence that damaged a flight over the Indian Ocean and killed one passenger was the result of “climate change.” Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington, supports the theory of man-made climate change. But these fear-mongering claims were too much even for him. Mass addressed this on his blog:

Is turbulence increasing rapidly over time as suggested by the media headlines?  

FAA records don’t seem to suggest this.  Below is a graph showing the percentage of aircraft incidents/accidents caused by turbulence (dark line).   No increasing trend since the late 1980s!

So where are all these dramatic claims for increasing turbulence with global warming coming from?  

Answer:  from a handful of papers from one group at the University of Reading.

In [one] paper, they DON’T USE ANY TURBULENCE OBSERVATIONS.  Rather, they use analysis of weather data on a grid (called a reanalysis) and use a theoretical model that they suggest should indicate shear-forced turbulence.   But they really don’t have the data to back this up or to demonstrate their approach is reliable.  

Even more problematic, the 55% increase in turbulence they cite is NOT for the entire world but just for one region in the North Atlantic.    If you read the actual paper (I have), there are all kinds of qualifiers that never made it into media stories.

A few level-headed climate scientists exist who support the AGW theory but do not support the media and government colluding to ratchet up fear.

More, please!

Learn more about the Left’s reliance on scientism over science: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science