(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: A biomass power plant in rural North Carolina reignites concerns over clean energy and environmental justice (Inside Climate News), Study finds Native American communities face greater air pollution burdens (New Mexico Political Report), How rising sea levels could push up a 'toxic soup' into Bay Area (KQED), How Texas' energy woes are derailing life in this Houston neighborhood (HuffPost)
IPCC: Here's the thing about that dire climate report: we have the tools we need to fix things (USA Today), Scientists identify the missing ingredient for climate action: political will (Grist), There’s a silver lining to the U.N.’s final warning on climate change (Rolling Stone), 'It’s now or never' to act on climate change, scientists warn (Black Wall Street Times)
FOSSIL FUELED WAR: War won't derail EU clean energy push, analysts say (Axios), US Energy Secretary: ‘Is it worth paying a bit more for your gas to not finance this bloody war in Ukraine?’ (MSNBC), The climate case for seizing superyachts, Russian and otherwise (Grist), Push against Russian fuel could accelerate clean energy transition (The Hill), Russia’s invasion supercharges push to make a new green fuel (Bloomberg $)
- EUROPE: The role of natural gas in the Russia-Ukraine conflict (CNBC), The case for and against EU sanctions on Russian oil (Reuters, explainer), Impact on EU, UK steel industry of bans on Russian coal imports (Reuters, Factbox), Europe is planning to crack down on Russian coal. It's bad news for Putin, but won’t devastate the EU. (Fortune), European coal, German power prices rise on phased-in Russian coal embargo (S&P Global), European countries debate how to cut purchases of Russian oil (Wall Street Journal $), Russia says coal earmarked for Europe can be redirected to other markets (Reuters), Ban European flights and car use in cities to hurt Putin, report urges (The Guardian)
- US POLITICS: No more 'dillydallying' and 'lollygagging': Congress finally puts its foot down on Russia (Politico Pro $), PA.'s natural gas may not help Europe to replace Russian supplies (Philadelphia Inquirer)
PUERTO RICO: Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans still without power amid dayslong outage (HuffPost), Power returning to Puerto Rico, but frustrations remain (New York Times $, CNN, The Hill, Axios)
CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: As G20 chair, coal-heavy Indonesia sends mixed signals on green transition (Thomson Reuters Foundation), Wealthy nations responsible for 74 percent of ecological harm: study (The Hill)
CLIMATE LITIGATION: Baltimore gets venue win in climate case against Exxon, BP (Reuters, E&E $), Frustrated and anxious, climate advocates are turning to legal action. The latest petitioners: College students (CNN)
CLIMATE COMMUNICATIONS: Talking about climate change is depressing. Does it have to be? (Buzzfeed)
LIFE & DEATH: More than half of activists killed in 2021 were land, environment defenders (Mongabay), An Indigenous village works to save a Brazilian forest, seed by seed (Washington Post $), Brazil's Amazon rainforest has already reached a new deforestation record this year (CNN)
HEALTH: Why American teens are so sad (The Atlantic)
AGENCIES: 5 takeaways from HHS' environmental justice strategy (Modern Healthcare), Pork producers push 'parity' in USDA conservation program (E&E $), TVA board nominees support exploring clean energy options as federal utility plans coal retirements (Utility Dive)
WHITE HOUSE: Here is Joe Biden’s plan to build a 21st-century power grid (Energy Monitor), The new White House rule: Do not talk about Joe Manchin (Politico), How the White House plans to tackle climate change in disadvantaged communities (Greenbiz)
- DPA: Biden mining order won't change biggest hurdle: Permits (E&E $)
THE HILL: 'Both are wrong': moderates rue partisan bickering over gas prices (Politico Pro $)
HOUSE: House climate committee hearing on efficiency delves into pipeline policy, gas bans, China and Putin (Utility Dive), Jayapal charts path for the left, eyes leadership role (E&E News)
SENATE: McConnell: Biden needs to 'take the shackles' off US energy production (Axios)
- MANCHIN: How Joe Manchin knifed the Democrats — and bailed on saving democracy (Rolling Stone), West Virginians gear up for 'coal baron blockade' at Joe Manchin’s coal plant (Truthout), Arrests as protesters blockade West Virginia coal plant where Senator Joe Manchin makes $500,000 a year (Independent, Times West Virginian, Salon, AP), Manchin boosts mineral research — and the coal industry (E&E $), Joe Manchin waffles on electric vehicles: 'I have grave concerns about moving too quickly towards an EV-only future' (Business Insider), Manchin boosts mineral research — and the coal industry (E&E News), Manchin restates EV skepticism in 2nd minerals hearing (E&E $), Manchin to visit Alberta oilsands in effort to revive Keystone XL Pipeline (Digital Journal)
POLITICS: Democrats search for sweet spot on gas prices, climate goals (E&E News), Democrats search for sweet spot on gas prices, climate goals (E&E News), A sour and angry America poised to punish Democrats this fall (Politico Pro $), Democrats turn to their Gen Z whisperer as youth support wobbles (Politico Pro $)
CITIES AND STATES: New Yorkers to get gas tax holiday (The Hill), Pennsylvania governor appeals RGGI pause to state's highest court (Politico Pro $), Weatherization, heat pumps, EVs: State pushes energy cost solutions, but can you do them this year? (Portland Press Herald), UN report calls for urgent climate action as Oregon advocates push for state to do more (The Oregonian)
CALIFORNIA: Report to California legislature: Prepare for sweeping effects of climate change (KPBS and Cal Matters)
FERC: D.C. Circuit drama hits FERC, Mountain Valley pipeline (E&E News)
IMPACTS: ‘This is an emergency’: Australia’s extreme weather crises spark anger at climate inaction (The Guardian), Climate change poses a huge threat to railroads. Environmental engineers have ideas for how to combat that (Inside Climate News), Facing disastrous floods, they turned to mangrove trees for protection (New York Times $), It's the time of year New England allergy sufferers dread. Here are tips to help you prepare for spring (WBUR), Snow crabs in the Bering Sea have been hard to find — partially due to climate change (NPR)
SEA-LEVEL RISE: Can Liberia's capital keep the sea out without hurting the coastal economy? (Bloomberg $)
WILDFIRES: Bringing back fire: how burning can help restore Eastern lands (Yale Environment 360)
HURRICANES: 19 named tropical storms predicted for 2022 (NBC)
RENEWABLES: Clean energy sector eyes window for passing federal tax breaks amid challenge of high energy prices (Utility Dive), Energy company to pay up to $35 million after turbines killed eagles (Washington Post $), Norway to resume onshore wind power licensing after 3-year break (Reuters), Shell in race for $1.1 billion Spanish green energy projects (Reuters), Sunnova CEO says war in Ukraine will spur shift to renewables, calls on US to foster solar panel production (CNBC), Tariff battle splits solar energy industry (Washington Examiner), Three-quarters of Britons back expansion of wind power, poll reveals (The Guardian), Geothermal powerhouse iceland hit by lack of electricity (Bloomberg $)
BATTERIES: Elon Musk says Tesla may have to get into the lithium business because costs are so 'insane' (CNBC)
BUILDINGS: A super building for fragile times (New York Times $)
EFFICIENCY: A Cold War law could be used to boost heat pump production (Boston Globe $)
LNG: ‘Major disruptions’ could delay large [Rio Grande] LNG project (E&E $), 5 things to know about liquefied natural gas and its role in the Ukraine crisis (The Hill), Another LNG tanker took a dramatic U-turn in pursuit of higher prices (Bloomberg $), Quebec LNG backers seek EU boost to revive rejected project (Bloomberg $), U.S. gas storage emptied by exports to Europe and Asia (Reuters, John Kemp column)
OIL & GAS: How Shell’s new Gulf platform will make money at almost any oil price (Houston Chronicle), Shell's 13-year journey from discovery to first oil shows why US output is flat (Bloomberg $), What to know about a planned natural gas 'peaker' plant in Mass. (WBUR)
PIPELINES: Great Plains farmers push back against CO2 pipelines encroaching on their land (Truthout), Would Keystone XL have mattered with gas prices now? (E&E News)
COAL: Banks say they're getting tough on coal, but they keep lending trillions to polluters (CNN)
HYDROGEN: Biden’s hydrogen hub plan sparks $8 billion race among US states (Bloomberg $)
UTILITIES: As western wildfires spread, utilities outside California face lawsuit risks (Wall Street Journal $)
EVs: As gas prices went up, so did the hunt for electric vehicles (New York Times $), Federal study suggests Calif. EVs are bending gasoline curve (E&E News), GM and Honda are working together to create cheaper electric vehicles (NowThis), Hertz wants to accelerate its efforts to rent electric vehicles (Popular Science), Massachusetts needs at least 750,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2030. We are nowhere close. (Boston Globe $), States' registration plans could accelerate electric vehicle adoption (ABC), The world's electric vehicle fleet will soon surpass 20 million (Bloomberg $)
- TRUCKS FOR EXTREMELY SECURE MANLY MEN: How Ford’s electric F-150 pickup truck will cut carbon pollution (Bloomberg $), Truck makers face a tech dilemma: batteries or hydrogen? (New York Times $)
THE KIDS THESE DAYS: ‘It’s a media war’: the UK’s top anti-oil campaigner fights on aged 80 (The Guardian)
ACTIVISM: A newfound best friend helps this doctor turn anxiety into action (Yale Climate Connections)
- XR UK: Extinction Rebellion stages mass protest in central London (The Guardian), Climate activists ‘disrupt supplies from three oil terminals in England’ (The Guardian), Climate change protesters block London's Tower Bridge, vow more disruption (Reuters), Scientists arrested for peaceful climate protests around the world say 'climate revolution now' (Salon)
- XR, BUT MORE URGENT: Fireproof Australia: who are the radical Extinction Rebellion splinter group? (The Guardian), Just Stop Oil: behind the scenes with the activists (The Guardian)
ARTS: Coal + Ice exhibit spotlights mining life, climate impacts (E&E $)
FAST FASHION: Shein: the unacceptable face of throwaway fast fashion (The Guardian), Why ‘eco-conscious’ fashion brands can continue to increase emissions (The Guardian)
CARBON REMOVAL: Carbon removal’s hard problems require hard tech fixes (Bloomberg $), Carbon storage gets dirty: The movement to sequester CO2 in soils (Canary Media)
TOYS: Mattel releases its first carbon neutral toys, including a Matchbox Tesla (CNN)
FINANCE (AND FALSE DICHOTOMIES): Online bank funds climate solutions, not fossil fuels (Yale Climate Connections), Rio [Tinto] says climate change 'at heart of strategy' after investors demand action (Reuters), Investors urge governments not to ditch climate for energy security (Reuters)
GRETA: Greta Thunberg Is publishing the ‘ultimate guide’ to climate change (Smithsonian Magazine)
DRYPTO: Can the blockchain give this island nation threatened by climate change a digital future? (Discover Magazine), Tesla, block and blockstream team up to mine bitcoin off solar power in Texas (CNBC)
INFRASTRUCTURE: The answers to real estate’s climate tech questions may be all around us (Tech Crunch)
WILDLIFE: How manatees got into hot water (NPR)
INTERNATIONAL: Mexico could be renewable energy behemoth in 2 years (E&E $), Climate activist on ‘indefinite’ hunger strike at Parliament gets support of dozens of top scientists (The Independent), Europe to develop digital Earth to address climate change (E&E News), Lack of ESG premium deters South Africa green investors (E&E $), Plan to ban dark roofs abandoned as [New South Wales] government walks back sustainability measures (The Guardian), Sweden set to be world’s first country to target consumption-based emission cuts (Climate Home) |
Can Someone Check on Joe Bastardi? Latest CFACT Post An Unhinged, Unedited Rant on Trans Issues, Covid, Climate, Putin and Hitler
Weather forecaster Joe Bastardi has always been a bit of a character — his anti-climate science book cover certainly suggests he has a sense of humor and doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is good because he’s a deeply unserious person.
But last week he seems to have drifted even further into bizarre territory, with content leading us to think someone should ask Bastardi if he smells burnt toast and make sure he hasn't had a stroke or something. For example, on Friday he tweeted:
Left seeks to weaken ever foundational basis for our nations strength, The Phony climate war is crushing the economy. They trash the ideas of the founders. They blur ethical and biological lines, promote warped form or racism.And then wonder why guys like Putin do what they do.
Super coherent content! (Errors there, and in the below quotes, are so plentiful that we couldn’t include [sic] every time without it getting ridiculous.) It was similar to a post at CFACT by Bastardi last Monday, which seems to have been not just not-edited before posting, but not written at all, and instead dictated to an instant transcriber programmed by e.e. cummings.
Prefaced by an excerpt of a Bloomberg piece on the Great Resignation of workers opting out of late stage capitalism as it kills them for profit through existential pandemic and planetary climate crises, Bastardi does his best imitation of a street preacher trying to gin up some attention. Normally we abstain from extensively block quoting deniers because there’s little value in reprinting disinfo, but there’s simply no trimming or paraphrasing this kind of thing:
This is simply astounding. A Pandemic sweeps the world, targeting essentially the weakest among us ( old, co-morbidity). This of course is tragic and does demand a response from a Christian point of view, for we know whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. So this is not me saying we should have just rolled over and let nature take her course, Men are meant to adapt. . BUT TO THE REAL PROBLEM, not one that turns into a phony agenda-driven issue, So here is part one of the ‘Existential Threat,'
That’s where the paragraph ends, and the next apparently where part one begins. And if it sounds like a street preacher who just got dosed with LSD by some merry pranksters, that actually may be the case, as the next paragraph references the psychedelic days of Bastardi’s youth:
The pandemic which for much of the planet was a matter of stepping up one’s levels to try to get more healthy to simply avoid it. It was like a wake-up call. But what is the response due to the hysteria that was put upon people?. Shut down. How is this any different from the old ” Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Interestingly enough many in that generation now push a control-oriented agenda that is leading to basically what Timothy Leary preached. . It’s no wonder drug-related problems are going thru the roof The destruction will of THE INDIVIDUAL to fight through head-on came to pass, so the result is predictable, I will just go along to get along and any desire for exceptionalism is cast to the 4 winds.
In the next paragraph, the drug mention switches from Lucy to ‘roids, as Bastardi notes that he went on a bodybuilding “rampage, competing every 2 months… if you do not do steroids ( and at. 5 9 154 it is obvious I do not) YOU HAVE TO BE HEALTHY.”
Doesn’t sound like he’s particularly healthy, but apparently he is the epitome of hard-nosed decision making:
So I double down on my immune system research, talked to doctors who see the parallels of the Covid response to Climate and so that link makes one question so-called authority. I marveled at Fauci, who had not treated a patient in 30 years telling doctors on the front line they didn’t know what they were doing, it is akin to climate people that never made a forecast believing their ideas are the only ones that matter. So off I went and am still going, I could get Covid tomorrow. Heck, I might have had it. My parents died from it. My brother and his family got it, We were all in the same house at Christmas. But my point is that if we laid flat and simply got pushed around by the whim of every Dr. Fauci statement would we be better off?
Well, assuming you liked your parents and would prefer to have been able to see them alive at a future family gathering, yes, we probably would have been better off. But, somehow, from there, Joe digresses further with another block of text that size and coherence rounding out that paragraph. The next one picks up with a lesson on ants, because apparently when they can’t find a queen, “they simply lay around and do nothing” which is just like what’s challenging people today, which is apparently the existence of trans people, though he doesn’t quite say it:
The culprit is the total confusion ( including blurring lines biologically, which is what the Babylonians did to Daniel, changing his name to ” Lady who serves the king” in Babylonian) to break the spirit of the individual with an upwardly mobile desire. Easier to control a weak sleeping man than one that is strong and smart.
We can certainly agree with Joe that there’s some confusion, but it seems he’s the one struggling with it. Because now, we present, without comment or edits, as it appears on CFACT, the last two paragraphs equivocating climate policies and Covid measures to Hitler and Putin bombing civilians:
And now to climate. Same thing. I wrote about it in my book, the Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war. People are absolutely terrified that the climate is out of control. So they accept left and right what they are told, They don’t dig in below the surface. They are not taught to embrace adversity ( even if it’s not there in this case) and adapt and counter. So why work if the planet is a living hell hole? This is an astounding belief since life on planet earth is better than it’s ever been, It’s amazing how shallow the thinking is with people that wish to throw up their arms and give up. Do they not realize that the very agenda they buy into is the agenda that is enslaving them with what is mass poverty of individual thought and freedom. You can’t make this up. But it’s the brilliance of the parasitic climate predators that has led to this, They know their mark, how to take from the hard-working host and then prey on the weaker. They know people have to be mentally and physically demoralized so their will breaks, They use a phony war for their real war, which is to break the will of the people, You saw Hitler and now Putin do it by bombing civilians. How is this not the same thing, dressed up in a phony save the world missive? Putin is trying his own version of Pax Romana,so did Hitler. If I rule what I want then everything is peaceful ( Rome’s theory). Well, I again ask, how is the climate agenda, or any of these ball of confusion agendas any different? Do everything our way and it will all be fine. Those ants are very peaceful lying around with no challenges.
Maybe the reason for diversity and varying cultures IS TO ADVANCE THE HUMAN CONDITION. and the whole control agenda runs counter to that, I do not know, But I do know that Covid and Climate and a whole bunch of other things share a common link of distraction and fear, and they are designed not to advance the individual, but destroy his will. And that is an anti-human agenda to me.
Usually we’d end with some snark or analysis, but at this point we’re genuinely concerned for Joe’s well-being. Someone should really check on him, and maybe get him a doctor.
(Or at least an editor…) |
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