Guest ridicule by David Middleton
David Middleton has been a proud member of the Climate-Wrecking Industry since 1981.
From the flamingly left-wing The Nation…
The Climate-Wrecking Industry… and How to Beat It
Insisting that we’re all responsible for global warming lets the biggest corporate polluters off the hook.
By Jason Mark YESTERDAY 6:00 AM
Among climate activists, the scene is remembered with a mix of embarrassment and scorn: at the end of his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, having just detailed the existential threat posed by global climate change, offered the audience a way to take action: Change your light bulbs. Gore’s prescription seemed completely incommensurate with the scale of the problem. The future of the human race, as well as millions of other species, is hanging in the balance—better get to the hardware store for some compact fluorescents.
Yet even today, at this late hour, the fight against global warming is bedeviled by public bewilderment.
[…]
According to peer-reviewed studies by Richard Heede and the Climate Accountability Institute, the business practices of just 90 fossil-fuel companies are responsible for two-thirds of the observed increases in global surface temperatures between 1751 and 2010.
[…]
Drawing on this and other research, The Nation has assembled a list of the “Worst of the Worst” in the climate-wrecking industry. (See our list on the opposite page.) Earning a dishonorable mention is the Republican Party, which continues to drink the Kool-Aid of climate denial and to obstruct even the most modest measures to protect the climate. Also on the list is the US Chamber of Commerce, which has spearheaded much of the opposition from business groups as a whole.
[…]
Dude! This is the Internet, Al Gore’s invention… There is no “opposite page.”
Back to the delusional rant…
One weakness of campaigning directly against the climate wreckers is that it’s simply unrealistic to expect a corporation to abandon the very reason for its existence. A lasting and equitable solution to climate change would put the fossil-fuel industry out of business, since these companies aren’t going to walk away from their (for now) still-profitable enterprises.
Recognizing that problem, organizers have sought to outflank the companies by targeting their bankers.
[…]
Yet while they’ve declined to finance specific projects, these banks are still extending loans to the carbon polluters’ various holding companies. And even their baby steps toward climate responsibility have generated blowback. HSBC has been quietly blackballed by the fossil-fuel industry, which has had little difficulty finding other lenders (most notably JPMorgan Chase) to fill the gap. For now, at least, the banks need fossil-fuel companies as much as these companies need the banks.
[…]
Dude! They’re “banks.” Banks that don’t lend money to qualified borrowers, cease to be banks. Your idiot savantism enabled you to grasp the fact that oil & gas companies are oil & gas companies, coal companies are coal companies… But, you don’t seem to grasp the fact that banks are banks.
Back to the delusional rant…
Destroying the climate, in short, remains a winning business proposition.
Dude!
(Update 1, Sept. 1, 2018)
Dude!
Warmunists whose livelihood depends on Gorebal Warming scare momgering (you, Mann, Schmidt, Hayhoe, Cook, Lewendowski, etc.) deliver no useful product to society.
While the Climate Wrecking Industry powers 98% of our transportation, 67% of our electricity and feeds half of the human population.
(End Update 1)
Now for the really delusional bit:
Among activists, a consensus is emerging that legal action may prove the best way to bring the climate wreckers to account.
Dude! Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with other left-wing rags…
ADAM ROGERS SCIENCE 07.20.18
TURNS OUT CITIES CAN’T SUE OIL COMPANIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
YOU CAN’T SUE your way to a solution for global warming. So says the judge.
On Thursday, Judge John Keenan of New York’s Southern District dismissed the City of New York’s lawsuit against the international oil and gas companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. Facing billions of dollars in climate change-related damage in the coming years, New York was hoping to extract some money from the transnational companies that extract the oil that people burn for energy—raising the planet’s temperature, exacerbating storms, melting polar ice and elevating sea levels, worsening wildfires, extending droughts, and allowing diseases to spread farther and faster.
But no. The problem isn’t the science; it’s settled. The problem is the law. Even though attorneys for the city tried to argue that their complaint was covered by federal common law and the courts, Judge Keenan found otherwise—that in the end they were suing over emissions, and so the Clean Air Act took over. Which is to say, what New York wanted to do in a lawsuit is covered by the regulatory powers of the president and Congress. “Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by Defendants,” Keenan writes. “But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”
Cities around the country have been filing lawsuits, hoping to get money from oil companies to pay for things like seawalls and infrastructure improvements—part of a strategy that’s been developing for decades. Oil companies have continued to market and lobby for lighter regulation on a product that made life harder on the only planet anyone knows about with life on it, while the US government moved slowly, if at all, toward remaking the country’s energy production and carbon emissions. If regulation and the law won’t help, the theory goes, you turn to the courts.
That’s not going well. Keenan’s decision comes not even a month after a similar defeat 3,000 miles away in June to a lawsuit filed by San Francisco and Oakland against the same oil companies. That case had the same outcome, this time from Judge William Alsup of the Northern District1 of California: “Although the scope of plaintiffs’ claims is determined by federal law, there are sound reasons why regulation of the worldwide problem of global warming should be determined by our political branches, not by our judiciary,” he writes. “The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”
[…]
Dude! You’ve already lost that battle. Gorsuch + Kavanaugh + ACE = You Lose!
Back to the delusional rant…
The climate wreckers do, in fact, appear to be shaken by the lawsuits. In a procedural counterattack, ExxonMobil has petitioned a Texas judge to allow it to depose attorneys and local officials from the California communities suing the company.
Dude! That’s how lawsuits work. You get to depose the other side. If ExxonMobil hadn’t petitioned for depositions, it would have been evidence that they were so shaken, that their attorneys forgot how to be lawyers. (Parenthetical comments were added by me)..
Whitehouse (a truly whacked out Senator from the most insignificant State in the nation) and Carlson (“a professor at the UCLA School of Law”), among others, think the lawsuits could open the way for a kind of grand bargain on climate change: In exchange for helping to pass a law mandating an economy-wide tax on carbon, the major polluters would receive immunity from lawsuits. But such a deal would have to come with financial accountability for the climate wreckers’ misdeeds—what Whitehouse called a “massive climate-relief fund” modeled on the tobacco settlement and BP’s settlement for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. “They don’t get to walk away scot-free,” Whitehouse said.
Of course, for that to happen, climate-action champions would have to gain control of Congress. Which means that climate activists, like the rest of the progressive movement, need to do everything they can to ensure that Congress changes hands.
That’s the sort of transformation that will require far more work—and many more people—than changing a light bulb.
Jason Mark is the editor in chief of Sierra magazine and the author of Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.
How many Warmunists does it take to change a light bulb? (I need a punch line).
Dude! Sheldon Whitehouse… A total whack job.
Dude! Do you think Whitehouse realized he was supporting enhanced oil recovery when he did this?
Jul 12 2017
Heitkamp, Whitehouse, Capito Lead Bipartisan Coalition to Reintroduce Bill Promoting Carbon Capture
Bipartisan Bill has Strong, Broad Support from Republican and Democratic Senators, Coal Companies, Environmental Groups, Labor Organizations
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) today led a broad bipartisan group of senators in reintroducing legislation to extend and expand a key tax credit to encourage technological innovation that would reduce carbon emissions, and recognize the need for a diverse energy mix around the world for years to come.
The 45Q tax credit, which the bill would extend, supports maintaining a place in our energy mix for existing resources like coal and natural gas by encouraging development and use of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies and processes—while also spurring adoption of low-carbon technologies to transform carbon pollution into useable products. Heitkamp and Whitehouse first introduced the bill last July. Since then, they have worked with Capito to build out bipartisan support among more progressive Democratic senators and more conservative Republican senators. A wide cross-section of coal companies, utilities, environmental groups, and labor organizations also support the bill, reinforcing a willingness from all sides to come together and seek bipartisan solutions.
[…]
“Everyone agrees carbon pollution is bad, but under the current rules new technologies to reduce carbon can’t gain a foothold in the market,” said Whitehouse. “This bipartisan bill will help level the field for new technologies, allowing facilities that prevent emissions to compete with older, dirtier plants. In the process, we’ll clear a path for promising businesses in Rhode Island and around the country that turn carbon pollution into useful products. That’s a win-win.”
[…]
The Climate-Wrecking Industry
Since the “Worst of the Worst” list was apparently left behind in the print edition, I looked up “peer-reviewed studies by Richard Heede and the Climate Accountability Institute“… I think this is the relevant peer-reviewed “study.”
Although, it only covers 1880-2010… Here are the “Worst of the Worst”…
- If we accept that from 1880-2010, atmospheric CO2 rose from 290 to 390 ppmv, ExxonMobil is responsible for just under 3 ppmv of the rise.
- If we accept that from 1880-2010, global mean surface temperature increased by 0.8 °C, ExxonMobil is responsible for just under 0.024 °C of warming.
- If we accept that from 1880-2010, global sea level rose by 320 mm (12.6 in), ExxonMobil is responsible for just over 0.64 mm (0.025 in) of sea level rise.
And they’re US Public Enemy #2 in the Climate-Wrecking Industry? US Public Enemy #1, Chevron, only barely edges out ExxonMobil. And the Climatariat wonders why we laugh at them.
Reference
Ekwurzel, B., Boneham, J., Dalton, M.W. et al. The rise in global atmospheric CO2, surface temperature, and sea level from emissions traced to major carbon producers. Climatic Change (2017) 144: 579. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-1978-0
Dude! ExxonMobil is not a “carbon producer”!
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
How many Warmunists does it take to change a light bulb?
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the light bulb, and Michael Mann who will insist that there was nothing unusual about this when comparing to how people changed lightbulbs in the Middle Ages.
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the light bulb and one to insist we need a lightbulb changing tax to decrease the number of times people change lightbulbs.
—————————————————————————————————
Almost every one.
One to let us know that if we don’t change the light bulb within a hundred years
It may get get really really hot in the house and we may have a fire.
The plumbing will breakdown creating floods in the basement.
Your dog may not survive to see the next century.
And 97% of the rest of them to write papers supporting these scenarios.
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the lightbulb and one to make sure it is the lead story on CNN the next day. And if they can somehow blame Trump for the lightbulb going out they have a lead story for a week.
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the lightbulb and one to get the cities to sue GE and Westinghouse.
—————————————————————————————————
1
Just one to insist that large sums of money should go to the 3rd world so they can adjust to not changing their lightbulbs.
————————————————————————————————-
2
One to change the lightbulb and one to insist the is no relationship between the burnt out light bulb and electricity.
—————————————————————————————————
3
One to change the lightbulb, one to want a Nobel Prize for it and Al Gore to let you know that he invented the light bulb.
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the lightbulb and one to insist we should go back to a more environmentally friendly time like when people had gas lighting.
—————————————————————————————————
1.
One to insist that no one can even speak about changing a lightbulb let alone change it unless they have a PhD in Lightbulb Changing Science.
—————————————————————————————————
2.
One to change the lightbulb and one to point out how much better off is society with 5 dollar LCD lightbulbs then incandescent bulbs which cost 89 cents.
—————————————————————————————————
2
One to change the lightbulb and one to insist that too many people are changing too many light bulbs and that is why the Arctic is melting.
I’ve never seen an LCD light bulb, however it’s been a long time since LED bulbs were 5 dollars each. Between the longer life and the reduced energy costs you will save money with the LED bulb. However it is and should always be the individual consumers right to select which they want to buy.
That’s dependent, of course, upon the LED bulbs being sold not being so cheap that they stop working after a few months. Home Depot, for instance, sells this type… same price as all the others and only 1/10th the life! What a deal.
Every single LED bulb I’ve bought has stopped working in a short time (much shorter than the average expected lifespan of, for instance, a typical incandescent bulb), whereas the quality bulb (manufactured not-in-China) I stole from work is still going strong after a few years.
Though the studies of Richard Heede and the Climate Accountability Institute may be peer-reviewed, the claims of the climate models are not falsifiable. Thus the investigations of the global warming climatologists are not truly “scientific.”
I was lured here under false pretenses!
David’s article correctly fits under his title.
However, I was reading the title somewhat differently.
I thought, “Hot dang! Someone finally put all of the alarmist doom predictions, causes and alleged fixes into one chart.”
Man, I had it wrong!
How many Warmunists does it take to change a light bulb?
At least 34 with 1 opposing, you have to have a 97% consensus the bulb needs changing.
David, you have made a notable phrase: “If we accept that ….”.
“If we accept that ….. ” is a phrasing that needs to be used more often. Much discussion here often “accepts” or entertains the narrative set forth by the alarmist community as the starting point of a discussion.
If we accept that the “so-called” scientists or alarmists have any valid points we should state that we are arguing from the point that “if we accept that they even had a point to begin with”.
Real scientists almost always qualify statements like these.
Typographical error.
It’s Weldon Shitehouse.
It isn’t often we see a Climate Faithful admit that the warming has been going on since before the US was a country. It kind of undermines their ‘Big Oil done it’ meme when you realize that even Steam power hadn’t been invented yet.
~¿~
Obviously, economic interests are still in the forefront of world sustainability. If we think of a quick solution, LENR technology can mean the last chance. Thousands of research institutes are working on this subject and even this year a breakthrough is possible. However, it is true that there is no evidence so far because the inventors are secretive for understandable reasons.
LENR is easily obtained. An electrical discharge generates a Z-pinch magnetic field which is applied to a synthetic diamond. The CVD process used to manufacture the synthetic diamond necessitates that the synthetic diamond has hydrogen molecules coating its surface (the diamond is built up via chemical vapor deposition of hydrocarbon gas (typically methane, CH4) and hydrogen gas).
This surface hydrogen bonds with oxygen from the atmosphere to create a microscopically thin film of water on the surface of the diamond. Atmospheric CO2 is then absorbed, creating carbonic acid.
This makes the surface of the diamond conductive. It also pulls electrons from the bulk of the diamond, leaving behind charge carriers (holes) in the bulk of the diamond, thus making the bulk of the diamond conductive, as well.
The Z-pinch magnetic field uses the charge carriers to tunnel into the bulk of the diamond. Given sufficient magnetic flux intensity, this disrupts the quark bonding (the electroweak interaction is, after all, an EM interaction at its base) inside the nucleons, causing quark flavor change and thus elemental transmutation of the carbon in the diamond, with a concomitant release of energy.
Obtaining LENR is easy. Controlling it is another matter.
For those interested, the weak interaction is considered to be the ‘residual strong interaction’. Thus it is the same sort of force as the strong, by which quarks bond via gluons.
The weak interaction and EM interaction, when unified (not symmetry broken) is called the electroweak.
In atoms, where the small distances yield high field strengths between the positively-charged nucleal proton(s) and bound electron(s), vacuum polarization occurs. It is this “self energy of the gauge bosons” which sustains the bound electron in its orbit. The electron (a point charge undergoing angular acceleration) emits Larmor radiation (virtual photons… ie: magnetism, which is why all matter exhibits magnetism… usually diamagnetism, with some valence electron configurations overriding the underlying diamagnetism with ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, ferrimagnetism or antiferromagnetism) at all times, but in its 1s orbit, physicists consider it to be in a ‘net zero radiation’ state. Of course, ‘net’ implies not only emission of energy (in the form of virtual photons) but absorption. The quantum vacuum zero point energy is where the bound electron obtains this energy, preventing it from spiraling in to the oppositely-charged proton(s) in the nucleus. It is the vacuum polarization in the vicinity of the nucleus which transforms the sinusoidal (spiral in 3D) quantum vacuum scalar waves into circular (spherical in 3D) motion of the bound electron (a sinusoid being a circular function, after all).
It should be noted that this implies that the non-zero expectation value of the quantum vacuum thus underpins the stability of all invariant-mass matter (which brings to mind another avenue of ‘tearing down’ invariant-mass matter into energy by artificially lowering quantum vacuum expectation value via a well-shielded Casimir cavity).
The above is corroborated by the work of Haisch and Moddel (who used Casimir cavities to artificially lower the quantum vacuum expectation value and thus lower the bound electron orbital radius of a noble gas, compelling the gas to give off photons (as happens when electron orbital radius decreases in all invariant-mass matter). They essentially created an artificial Lamb shift.) and by Boyer et. al. (who explicated the mechanism of sustained electron orbit as far back as 1975).
Quark flavor change is via the weak interaction. Quark flavor change can also be caused, therefore, by the weak and EM unified force, the electroweak.
Inside the nucleons, the weak and EM are unified into the electroweak. Outside the nucleons, spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak occurs via the Higgs mechanism.
Thus, a strong magnetic field can cause quark flavor change as described above via the electroweak interaction, and thus elemental transmutation and a concomitant energy release. That’s one avenue to LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction).
I notice that 2 of the commenters below the article in The Nation are whining that the Earth’s population is too large and needs to be reduced. I would have liked to have added a comment to suggest that they lead from the front and kill themselves, but you have to pay to comment. Paying just to comment? That’s not very socialist.
“the business practices of just 90 fossil-fuel companies are responsible for two-thirds of the observed increases in global surface temperatures between 1751 and 2010.”
So the British coal-mining companies caused 2/3 of the increase in global temperatures in 1752? Hmm…
The term “Climate Wrecking Industry” is revealing of the Marxist-Leninist roots of the Environmental Left propaganda and ideology. It has a direct parallel to the terms “Economy Wrecking” or “Industry Wreckers” the Soviet Communist Party used to arrest, imprison and execute people, often on made up charges of sabotage, Counter-Revolution, Enemies of the State, and treason; such indictments followed by sham trials, at first carefully staged public show trial performances, but then in secret because the former performances didn’t turn out quite the way the Party leaders, the NKVD Secret Police and Blue Cap prosecutors intended. Solzhenitsyn in Chapter 10, The Law Matures, The Gulag Archipelago, describes the reasons for Stalinist transition from public sham trials to secret sham trials in 1934-1937 in some detail.
The most memorable public sham trial Solzhenitsyn describes was the denunciation, arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of four District CP leaders in the ancient, slow moving, peasant village of Kady, in remote Ivanovo Province, Russia, for their successful efforts to save their local population from starvation, disobeying Politburo requisitions for extraordinary wheat flour shipments to Moscow, the prohibition of selling flour locally, and the decentralized baking of bread using abandoned Kulak cottage ovens that actually enhanced production above subsistence. P419-431.
One of the four defendants in testifying, Vaslov, didn’t follow the Prosecutors’ script. The Prosecutor accused Vaslov of Double Dealing and Wrecking. “Let the défendant tell us how he pulled off the nightmarish piece of wrecking that he stopped the sale of flour and the baking of Rye bread in the Central District bakery.”
In his exhange with the Prosecutor Karasik, Vaslov shouted that the Prosecutor should resign his position at the rostrum and come down and sit next to him.
He continued: ” The prohibitions on selling flour and baking rye bread were instituted by a decree of the Provincial Executive Committee. One of the permanent members of its presidium is Provincial Prosecutor Karasik. If that’s wrecking then why didn’t you veto the decree as Prosecutor? That means you were a wrecker before I was. ”
Vaslov and the other three were convicted and executed. I wonder if this is an example of what the Marxist-Leninist Left today means by Social Justice.