Reposted from the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
It’s always been just a little odd that the guy the Democrats most need to get on board to get their big transformational plans enacted is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, while at the same time the centerpiece of those plans is to put the most important industry of West Virginia, coal mining, completely out of business. That sounds like it’s going to be a tough sell. Is there any argument that might convince this guy to get with the program?
In one of the funniest articles I have read anywhere recently, the New York Times thinks that it has come up with the argument that will carry the day: threaten Manchin with witchcraft! The article, covering about half of the front page of yesterday’s print edition, tells Manchin that if he continues to “block” the Democrats’ plans to destroy the coal industry, a spell will be cast over his state and it will be inundated with floods. The headline is “Blocking Climate Plan With Hometown at Risk.”
The Times characterizes Mr. Manchin’s stance thusly:
Mr. Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept. Mr. Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas.
Seems reasonable. Better threaten the guy:
Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Mr. Manchin risks hurting his state.
And how exactly would that work? Simple: if Manchin remains intransigent, West Virginia will be destroyed by epic floods.
First Street [Foundation] calculated the portion of all kinds of infrastructure at risk of becoming inoperable because of a so-called 100-year flood — a flood that statistically has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. The group compared the results for every state except Alaska and Hawaii. In many cases, West Virginia topped the list. Sixty-one percent of West Virginia’s power stations are at risk, the highest nationwide and more than twice the average. West Virginia also leads in the share of its roads at risk of inundation, at 46 percent. The state also ranks highest for the share of fire stations (57 percent) and police stations (50 percent) exposed to a 100-year flood. And West Virginia ties with Louisiana for the greatest share of schools (38 percent) and commercial properties (37 percent) at risk.
But what, if anything, does any of this have to do with Mr. Manchin’s opposition to the destruction of West Virginia’s coal industry? The Times article does not say, other than repeatedly invoking the phrase “climate change,” as if that has something to do with flood risk from rivers in West Virginia. The article makes no attempt to demonstrate any relationship between climate change and river flood risk.
Perhaps we should look to see what we can find about trends in flooding and/or extreme wet conditions in the United States over the last century or so. That is the period when human “greenhouse gas” emissions have supposedly been warming the atmosphere. Here is, for example, this NOAA chart of what they call “very wet/dry” conditions in the U.S. from 1895 through September 2021:
Can you detect the trend of increasing “extreme wet conditions” in that chart as the atmosphere has warmed (by maybe 1 deg C) over the time in question? Neither can I. How about U.S. flood damage as a percentage of GDP? Here is a chart presented to Congress by Roger Pielke, Jr. in testimony in 2015:
That trend looks to be significantly down rather than up. Mr. Pielke’s comment:
The good news is U.S. flood damage is sharply down over 70 years.
How about the IPCC. Surely they can come up with something to scare us? Here is a 2018 IPCC document with the title “Changes in Climate Extremes and their Impacts on the Natural Physical Environment.” On the subject of floods, from page 175:
The AR4 and the IPCC Technical Paper VI based on the AR4 concluded that no gauge-based evidence had been found for a climate-driven globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades (Rosenzweig et al., 2007; Bates et al., 2008).
In short, the evidence to date gives no reason to believe that there is any reason that floods have increased, or are about to increase, due to “climate change.”
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A modern solar panel produces almost enough energy in its lifetime to manufacture a replacement panel without any surplus to actually power the grid.
Climate Scientists are not Engineers. They have no practical experience in designing solutions.
WV is entirely mountainous so it is likely more flood prone than any other state. Mountains concentrate the water in the narrow valleys where people mostly live, it being build able flat ground. In fact I live there. This is of course irrelevant since AGW is false.
But the answer to droughts and floods, however caused, is more reservoirs. Greens hate them so they are not on the table even though they are predicting lots more droughts and floods. More big green hypocrisy!
Well, the Venn diagram of those who chant on about following “DA SCIENCE!” for everything, and those who are into witchcraft is a circle.
And by witchcraft I mean anything such as astrology, auras, angels, chiropractic, homeopathy, traditional Chinse medicine (paid for by our tax dollars here in Canada, BTW), etc….
Hell our Prime Minstrel Sock Boy cups…(look it up, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…”
If there are any floods in West Virginia, they should sue the New York Times for damages caused by their witchcraft…in these days and times there are bound to be liberal judges out there who believe in such things.
Obviously they’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.
Let me know when the NYT erases WV from their maps.
Better send out more security teams to the dams in the state. We wouldn’t want a woke event to occur in helping predictions along.
And there shall come such a flood and devastation that ye shall know the hand of Gaia and let thy votes go. So let it be written in the NYT…and hopefully nowhere else.
Here is another scary thing…..
Biggest U.S. grid changes rules to shore up coal supply as winter approaches (yahoo.com)
After years of shutting coal plants to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions, U.S. energy companies have cut coal stockpiles at power plants to just 84.6 million short tons in September, their lowest in a month since March 1978, according to federal data.
By the middle of the winter, the federal government projected coal power plant stockpiles will collapse to 62.7 million short tons in February, the lowest on record, according to data going back to 1973.
Maybe we need another witch hunt at the New York Slimes. They’re good at it!
To the global warm-mongers, CO2 is the witch whose “spells” are always weaker than predicted. Senator Manchin doesn’t have to worry about floods in West Virginia any more than he did when he was Governor. The warm-mongers have no more control over the weather in West Virginia than anyone else.
West Virginia is a good bellwether in the battle between the global-warming scaremongers and the coal industry. Most of the coal miners are union members, and traditionally labor unions have supported Democrats as the party of the “little guy” against the “robber baron” corporations (as portrayed by the Democrats).
Bill Clinton carried West Virginia in the elections of 1992 and 1996, and both WV Senators were Democrats at the time. In the late 1990’s, then-Vice President Al Gore came out with his global-warming scare “Earth in the Balance”, and campaigned on reducing CO2 emissions to “save the planet”.
During the extremely close election of 2000, most of the attention focused on Florida, but what was less discussed at the time was the revolt of West Virginia’s coal miners against Al Gore’s agenda–George W. Bush carried West Virginia and its 5 electoral votes, without which Al Gore would have become President.
Since 2000, West Virginia has voted for all Republican Presidential candidates (by increasing margins), as Democrat candidates John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden have all attacked the coal industry in their campaigns (and in office for Obama and Biden).
Joe Manchin was elected Governor of West Virginia in 2004, and has always defended the coal industry. He was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, and re-elected in 2016 (by a smaller margin) as a Democrat. He was in the Senate minority between 2015 and 2020, and sometimes sided with Republicans on energy issues, although his vote didn’t matter then.
In the meantime, Republican Shelley Moore Capito was elected to WV’s other Senate seat in 2014, and was re-elected in 2020 with nearly 70% of the vote.
Joe Manchin may be a Democrat, but he’s not stupid. He knows that supporting legislation that would crush the coal industry in West Virginia would be political suicide, and he’s up for re-election next year. He is more afraid of West Virginia voters than of witches at the New York Times, and hopefully has the spine to stand up to the warm-mongers to the bitter end.
If witchcraft doesn’t work, you could always try radioactive hybrid terror pigs:
Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people’s hearts • The Register
so-called 100-year flood — a flood that statistically has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year
This implies it only happens every 100 years worldwide. That’s false, the 100 years is realtive to a spefcific flood plain or watershed. Given the thousands of watersheds worldwide you can actually expect several 100 year floods every year soemwhere in the world!