Wash Post: For the first time, the United States is designating a special diplomat to advocate for global biodiversity amid what policymakers here and overseas increasingly recognize as an extinction crisis. Monica Medina is taking on a new role as special envoy for biodiversity and water resources, the State Department announced Wednesday. … The appointment underscores the Biden administration’s desire to protect land and waters not just at home but to also conserve habitats abroad. ‘Not just about nature for nature’s sake’ … Medina noted that the Inflation Reduction Act passed this year set aside billions of dollars for conservation funding. … “It’s a crisis that we face that’s interwoven with the climate crisis, but also independent and important on its own,” she said. “If we can solve the biodiversity crisis, we’re a long way along the way to solving the climate crisis.”
The grift is on! The State Department’s new ‘diplomat for plants & animals’ just happens to be the wife of Biden’s White House chief of Staff Ron Klain. Imagine the coincidence!
By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/29/first-us-appoints-diplomat-plants-animals/
In a first, U.S. appoints a diplomat for plants and animals
Analysis by Dino Grandoni with research by Vanessa Montalbano
September 29, 2022 at 7:38 a.m. EDT
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Dino Grandoni, a national environment reporter for The Washington Post, wrote the top of today’s newsletter.
In a first, U.S. appoints a diplomat for plants and animals
As temperatures rise and habitats shrink, hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species around the world are at risk of vanishing.
For the first time, the United States is designating a special diplomat to advocate for global biodiversity amid what policymakers here and overseas increasingly recognize as an extinction crisis.
Monica Medina is taking on a new role as special envoy for biodiversity and water resources, the State Department announced Wednesday. She currently serves as the department’s assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.
The appointment underscores the Biden administration’s desire to protect land and waters not just at home but to also conserve habitats abroad.
‘Not just about nature for nature’s sake’
The loss of biodiversity isn’t just a tragedy for wildlife. It’s one of the biggest threats facing humanity.
According to a major U.N. report in 2019, a million species face possible extinction, with dire implications for humans who depend on ecosystems for food, fresh water and other resources. Overfishing, pollution, pesticides, disease, urban sprawl and, of course, climate change contribute to declines in imperiled species’ populations worldwide.
“There’s a direct connection between biodiversity loss and instability in a lot of parts of the world,” Medina said in a recent phone interview. “It’s not just about nature for nature’s sake. I think it is about people.”
Her appointment comes weeks ahead of a major biodiversity conference in mid-December in Montreal. The meeting originally was scheduled to take place in the Chinese city of Kunming in 2020 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
The aim of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity — also known as COP-15 — is for nations to reverse the loss of species by adopting an international framework for conserving biodiversity. The effort is akin to the climate talks in 2015 that yielded the Paris agreement.
- What the United States wants out of the conference: For nations to commit to conserving 30 percent of their land and water area. “We are looking for ways to reach that goal, because that’s what scientists tell us we need in order to have a healthy planet,” Medina said.
- One big hurdle: Defining what, exactly, counts as land and water conserved? “That is part of the discussion, is what counts,” she said.
- Is the United States doing its part? President Biden set a goal of conserving nearly a third of the nation’s land and waters by 2030.
Biden has taken a few steps toward that target, restoring protections for two desert expanses in Utah and reinstating fishing restrictions in a marine monument off New England. Both moves reversed decisions made by President Donald Trump.
But the Biden administration has yet to identify many other specific places for new protections. Medina noted that the Inflation Reduction Act passed this year set aside billions of dollars for conservation funding.
The link between biodiversity and climate change
Rising seas flood forests and kill trees. Increasing temperatures allow for the greater spread of disease, such as an avian form of malaria that is wiping out birds in Hawaii. Warming waters leach out oxygen, suffocating marine life.
But protecting ecosystems such as forests and peatlands, Medina noted, will help keep climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place.
“It’s a crisis that we face that’s interwoven with the climate crisis, but also independent and important on its own,” she said. “If we can solve the biodiversity crisis, we’re a long way along the way to solving the climate crisis.”
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The grift is on! The State Department’s new ‘diplomat for plants & animals’ just happens to be the wife of Biden’s White House chief of Staff Ron Klain. Imagine the coincidence!
#
Reality Check on Species extinction claims:
Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore on UN species scare: “You cannot call yourself a scientist if you pretend that there are 6.2 million species that have no names and have never been identified. That is not science. That is fiction. Fairy tale stories. And that’s what we’re being told here.”
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano described the report as a politically driven document, “the latest U.N. appeal to give it more power, more scientific authority, more money and more regulatory control.” “At best, the U.N. science panels represent nothing more than ‘authoritative bureaucracy,’ claiming they hype the problem and then come up with the solution that puts them in charge of ‘solving’ the issue in perpetuity,” Mr. Morano said in his prepared remarks. “A more accurate term for the U.N. than ‘authoritative science’ may be ‘authoritative propaganda.’”
Mr. Huffman fired back, referring to Mr. Morano as a troll. “I don’t know what inspires someone to make a career out of trolling scientists or monetizing contrarian ideology on the YouTube and Ted Talk circuit, but it’s just a very different kind of conversation than the science-based conversation I think many of us would try to have,” Mr. Huffman said.
No House committee hearing this year would be complete without a climate change row. Republicans took aim at the Green New Deal, the Paris climate agreement and the 97% scientific “consensus,” while Democrats’ witnesses stressed the impact of global warming on species.
Watch Morano’s opening statement here:
Media Matters outraged: Skeptics “[Marc] Morano and [Dr. Patrick] Moore also got more time at the hearing than the four scientists invited by the Democrats, according to Public Citizen.”
“Morano and Moore made a mockery of the House hearing, and that’s exactly what Republicans wanted.”
Warmists demand to know: “How did these two dominate a hearing run by Democrats?”
“Fox News has helped to put Morano and Moore in the public eye by giving them a platform to sow doubt about climate change and other serious environmental issues, and now the two men’s latest Fox-worthy rants are part of the congressional record.”
“So far in 2019, Morano has appeared on Fox News shows at least 10 times…Morano has also appeared three times this year on President Donald Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends.”
Watch: Morano testifies to Congress on how government can’t legislate climate
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Have they no understanding of priority rights in Washington DC?
As the world knows our very own now King Charles III has been talking to trees, like forever, surely he would be the natural candidate to become world ambassador for plants, He even speaks the language!…..
Double-Dealing in Darwin
Are intellectuals allowing dogma in science but not in religion?
Today, likewise, we see that evolutionism has its priests and devotees. Entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University tells us that the “evolutionary epic is mythology,” depending on laws that are “believed but can never be definitively proved,” taking us “backward through time to the beginning of the universe.” Wilson knows that any good religion must have its moral dimension, and so he urges us to promote biodiversity, to amend our original sin of despoiling the earth. There is an apocalyptic ring to Wilson’s writings, and in true dispensationalist style, he warns that there is but a short time before all collapses into an ecological Armageddon. Repent! The time is near!
https://www.beliefnet.com/news/science-religion/2000/01/double-dealing-in-darwin.aspx
Curb your enthusiasmHigh priests, holy writ and excommunications – how did Humanism end up acting like a religion?
In the second half of the 20th century, the outstanding Humanist in my sense has been my long-time friend Edward O Wilson, retired now from his post as professor of biology at Harvard but still going strong at 82 and always immersed in controversy. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature, he declares explicitly that Darwinism is a new mythology replacing the old religious forms. The story is now a familiar one:
… make no mistake about the power of scientific materialism. It presents the human mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion. Its narrative form is the epic: the evolution of the universe from the big bang of 15 billion years ago through the origin of the elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth… Every part of existence is considered to be obedient to physical laws requiring no external control. The scientist’s devotion to parsimony in explanation excludes the divine spirit and other extraneous agents.
Like Julian Huxley and the older evolutionists, Wilson is an ardent progressionist and believes that values emerge from the evolutionary process.
Snip
By temperament, Wilson is a deeply religious man. This goes back to his Baptist childhood in the American South. He describes his discovery of evolutionary biology as a conversion experience. His faith did not fall away: it changed horses. Despite a strategic alliance with religious leaders in the environmental cause, he can be scathing about religious beliefs. Nonetheless, he sees religion as fulfilling deep human needs. In that sense it needs to be replaced by something like it
https://aeon.co/essays/how-humanism-lost-its-way-in-a-charismatic-crusade
Save the birds and bats and natural habitats for many creatures-ban the diffuse, unreliable intermittent energy source from environmental hell, wind turbines.
Green up the planet even more and increase crop size as well as the amount of food for animals by increasing the building block and elixir of life, that beneficial gas, CO2.
But, Mike, where’s the money in doing that? Huh, huh?
I figured since she had been chosen for this very important Saving of The Planet position, she must have a strong background and qualifications in ecology, environmental sciences, biology etc. to have been selected besides being the wife of Ron Klein. (Just kidding.)
Much to my surprise, she has none. (Just kidding, again.)
She’s a lawyer which is, when you think about it, the perfect background as all she will do is sue scumbag humans who want to grow food or provide fossil fuel energy for survival and who dare to interfere with her plans to grease the palms of the climate charletans, er Save the Planet, I mean. Riiight.
Just when I think it can’t get any worse with the Biden Administration, they go and prove me wrong.
Monica Medina Wiki-Bio
https://marriedwiki.com/wiki/monica-medina
Medina earned her Juris Doctor with honors from Columbia Law School. Subsequently, she went in to serve in the office of General Counsel of the Army. There she worked on active duty in the United States Army. Besides, she achieved an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship in 1979. Later on, she received a Bachelor’s degree in arts from Georgetown University.
Americans need to do something about the Biden regime. It’s just getting ridiculous now.
Couldn’t Biden appoint a diplomat to lower the planet’s gravity as well. That would mean it would take far less fuel to move things about, thus lowering CO2 and saving the planet?
Or something…..?
Don’t forget more grifters needs more funds-
Biodiversity credits launched to help reverse Australia’s wildlife and habitat losses: Tanya Plibersek (smh.com.au)
It’s why they have their regular jetabout knees-ups to get their heads together on how to build the evil empire.
Oddly enough, many people still think electing representatives is so that they can serve the constituents, at least the ones who voted for them. Anyone who has served in government knows the actual purpose of being elected is to funnel money to friends, donors, and family. It has ever been thus when governments become separated from we the people.
A very creative approach to a sinecure.
“For nations to commit to conserving 30 percent of their land and water area. “We are looking for ways to reach that goal, because that’s what scientists tell us we need in order to have a healthy planet,” Medina said.”
The USA is a republic. Before the USA accepts any such 30% set-aside, it needs to be acknowledged that each state will have a 30% set-aside.
30 % of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey … and 30% of their water area.
Hey! I applied for that position.
So now you’re telling me the fix was in and I was never going to get the job?
Wish I would have known before I wasted all that time filling out the application. Sheesh!
Is this different from Trump appointing Jared?
Rational people see the Earth, it’s environment and all the flora and fauna in it as the miraculous world we inherited and in which we make our society blossom. The US state department, on the other hand, sees us as an unwanted intruder in a mythical eden where human breath is poison to the land and nothing but the destruction of society will sate the nature gods. On a positive note, most sane people will not support the destruction of modern society in order to pretend to save they Earth.