As Appalachians Languish, CBS Moderators Minimize Deadly Hurricane Helene With Climate Change Question
CBS seemingly cares little about its Appalachian viewers; debate questions hardly mentioned Hurricane Helene.CBS seemingly cares little about its Appalachian viewers; debate questions hardly mentioned Hurricane Helene.Scientists just test-fired a cloud device over American soil with the ultimate aim of blocking sunlight
The USS Hornet may be a decommissioned aircraft carrier, yet it has nevertheless become the launch-site for a controversial new war in the skies.
The Marine Cloud Brightening Program's Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement project, led by researchers from the University of Washington, took to the deck of the Hornet Tuesday to launch streams of particles into the sky above the San Francisco Bay. Their ultimate objective is apparently to block and reflect sunlight in hopes of limiting "global warming."
CAARE researchers behind the geoengineering scheme opted not to announce their experiment, reportedly citing concerns that there might be significant backlash.
After all, the American public — or at the very least, the residents of Alameda — might first want to hear from the hundreds of scientists who have called for a non-use agreement for solar radiation management and stated in an open letter that the "risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."
The experiment
Clouds bounce some of the sun's rays back into space. This supposedly helps cool temperatures locally.
The University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences conceded that fossil fuel emissions and other human activities have long generated aerosols in the atmosphere that mix in with low-altitude clouds, causing them to brighten and reflect more sunlight, having a cooling effect on the earth's climate.
"I think most people are aware that there's a greenhouse gas effect that warms climate," UW MCB program director Sarah Doherty told the Weather Channel. "But what most people aren't aware of is that the particles that we've also been producing and adding to the atmosphere offset some of that climate warming. So, the overall effect is one of climate warming, but it would be a lot more without that particulate pollution."
With climate alarmists concerned over supposed global temperature increases and the corresponding war on fossil fuels sure to rob the clouds of a contributing brightener, some scientists are keen to pump out aerosols of their own.
Robert Wood, the lead UW scientist running the cloud project, noted on his university blog that the team at the CAARE facility developed a "Cloud-Aerosol Research Instrument (CARI)." This device, which has multiple nozzles and resembles a snow maker, can apparently fire trillions of salt particles into the air.
The UW indicated that once emitted, such particles would only remain airborne in the atmosphere for a few days.
Wood told the San Francisco Chronicle simulations project that if 15% of Earth's marine clouds were artificially brightened, the globe might cool by approximately one degree.
According to the New York Times, CAARE researchers used their CARI device last week aboard the USS Hornet, firing particles and testing to make sure their cloud-brightening machine would function as desired outside a lab.
The Chronicle indicated that the next step of research will entail actually attempting to meddle with the clouds off the coast of California.
The concerns
"Every year that we have new records of climate change, and record temperatures, heat waves, it's driving the field to look at more alternatives," Wood told the Times. "Even ones that may have once been relatively extreme."
Contrary to Woods' intimation, many still regard marine cloud brightening to be an extreme and potentially fruitless initiative.
In addition to noting that MCB and other forms of solar radiation modification may ultimately accomplish little in the way of lowering global temperatures, the Congressional Research Service noted in a May 2023 report that some "modeling studies of [marine cloud brightening] have suggested it could alter precipitation patterns at global and regional levels."
A 2017 study published in Nature Communications indicated that aerosols released just in the northern hemisphere could possibly even lead to an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms elsewhere.
Late last month, a group of 31 top atmospheric scientists noted in a paper published in Science Advances that there is presently a "lack of a clear understanding of the relationship between aerosol and meteorological conditions and liquid water and cloud fraction adjustments and their timescales."
"Regional changes in temperature and rainfall could influence heat stress, water availability, crop productivity and the ability of communities to thrive," added the scientists who emphasized the need to evaluate the viability and risks of MCB.
The widespread concerns over the feasibility and fallout of such experiments has prompted the Biden administration to distance itself from the CAARE experiment, even though President Joe Biden signed Congress' Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, providing funding for a "scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions in the context of near-term climate risks and hazards," including aerosol injection.
The White House told the Times in a statement, "The U.S. government is not involved in the Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) experiment taking place in Alameda, CA, or anywhere else."
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Environmentalists’Life-Threatening Sulfur Launch Exposes Carbon Indulgences As A Scam
A climate startup that launched sulfur to block the sun follows ‘environmental, social, and governance’ investing to its logical conclusion and could significantly damage our planet.Horowitz: The energy crisis is worse than you think — and it’s by design
We can’t wait until after the election to deal with a looming winter electricity crisis. Republicans must make demands on energy production in the continuing budget resolution to promote nuclear and coal power plants, terminate all of the onerous regulations that have stifled their productivity, and turbocharge our natural gas delivery capabilities. Anything short of an immediate deregulation plan will place Americans in the same predicament as Europe, where they are discussing group showers, eating bugs, and drinking sewage, as they face a $2 trillion surge in electricity prices.
Thanks to the controlled demolition of coal and nuclear power, there is record demand on natural gas for electricity. And although our production and exports of natural gas are at record levels, they are not as high as they should be given the regulations and the stifling of pipelines, and they are not sufficient to compensate for the sudden embargo of all Russian gas supplies. This is why inventories in underground storage are operating well below baseline levels of the pre-COVID years.
As such, the Energy Information Administration is predicting a 7.5% increase in electricity rates over 2021, and that is before the next man-made or manipulated global crisis. However, in parts of the Northeast, rates have already more than doubled because of a lack of sufficient pipeline systems in place, with many proposals on the table having been blocked for years. New England gets almost no electricity from coal any more and relies heavily on natural gas. But these same states have banned fracking and gas pipelines as well! So absent robust infrastructure to transport and store natural gas, which the Northeast lacks, the people have failed to reap the benefits of increased natural gas production. Rather than piping the gas in straight from the Marcellus basin, New England was importing gas from Russia!
Our existing level of natural gas production would have been sufficient had our government not purposely set fire to our coal industry for a decade and then decided to engage in a thoughtless war with Russia without a contingency plan. In the U.S., coal once composed roughly half of our electricity source just 15 years ago, but has dropped precipitously because of destructive eco policies. Now it only accounts for 21% of our electricity source, so shocks to the system are going to harm American consumers. Yet thanks to the reduced inventories, we are struggling to even supply a smaller percentage of our grid with affordable rates. The price of thermal coal is now at an all-time high of $439 per metric ton.
Our electricity generation from coal power plants is down by nearly two-thirds since 2008. Thanks to numerous regulations during the Obama administration, 250 coal plants closed between 2010 and 2017, leaving us with just 240, less than a quarter of China’s inventory. Thus, while our recoverable coal assets are enormous – 60% greater than China’s reserves – our coal electric power inventory is running between 85 and 90 million tons, down over 30% since 2020 and more than 50% since 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As you can see, our production is at a record low, as are our inventories:
It would be one thing if our government planned ahead in its destruction of coal by ramping up natural gas pipelines and building more nuclear power plants. After all, if clean energy is the goal, those two are great candidates for clean and effective sources of energy. But clearly that is not the goal. Scarcity is the goal. Thanks to endless regulations by the same people who claim to want clean energy, no new nuclear reactors have come online in decades, while numerous others have been retired. At the end of 2021, there were 93 active reactors, down from 104 a decade ago. Our monthly nuclear utility generation is down 5% compared to 2019.
The only forms of energy that have been increasing, at a painful cost to taxpayers, are solar, wind, and electric vehicles. However, they are impotent during our time of need, and the obsessive push for electric vehicles to reduce gasoline consumption further exacerbates the strain on electricity, which is even scarcer, and further drains the already low utility of green energy that relies on batteries (now in great shortage) to run.
During the California heat wave, one would think Californians would have enough solar energy to power the entire state, given how much they invested in it and how strongly the sun was shining, particularly during those hot days. But as the Washington Post reports, so much of it went to waste because the batteries and transmission lines needed to feed solar power are too expensive, especially with the scarcity of batteries (in itself due to mining regulations as well as the contrived demand for electric cars).
At some point, it becomes clear this is being done on purpose. Government regulators are cutting off all the useful sources of energy and jamming the feeble renewable energy grid with further demand precisely at a time when they are cutting off all Russian energy. To top it off, Biden has drained nearly 40 years of Strategic Petroleum Reserve inventories headed into the winter. This can’t all be an accident. To quote Diederik Samsom, chief of staff for Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s executive vice president, “The two basic needs of life – food and energy – we have paid way too little for in the past 40 years.” In other words, this is being done on purpose.
So where are Republicans in all of this? Why are they not holding up the budget bill in the Senate until the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which raised numerous taxes and royalties on oil and gas exploration, is repealed? One of the provisions institutes a “methane fee,” which some estimate will single-handedly increase consumer natural gas bills by 17%. The tax will not only apply to the production of oil but also the transmission, storage, and exporting of natural gas, which is the worst thing you can do at a time of record high natural gas prices.
Moreover, the bill created all sorts of new incentives to promote electric vehicles, which will not only fail to ease the energy crisis, but will exacerbate it. It’s become clear that the electricity crisis is an even bigger deal than the spike in gasoline prices. Electric vehicles will create a tsunami of new demand on the electric grid at a time of record high prices, after people are already forced to pay a fortune for the vehicles. We are already witnessing this dynamic – of one green fascist policy running into the headwinds of another – playing out in California, where grid operators advised people not to charge their vehicles during the heat wave.
Horowitz: Oklahoma Gov. Stitt touts Agenda 2030 green energy as ‘where investments are headed’
If Democrats are akin to voracious wolves seeking to turn the American sheep into a carcass, the Republicans are the vultures seeking to cash in by feasting on that carcass rather than calling in the lions to battle the wolves and protect the American sheep. Nowhere is this more evident than with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signing on to the green energy “Agenda 2030” plan to replace cars with electric vehicles in supposedly conservative Oklahoma. Except, unlike most other Republicans, he should get points for honesty, providing us with a full understanding of why Republicans will never fight for us on an issue that matters. The reason? The money and “investments” are always on the side of tyranny.
It should now be abundantly obvious to any thinking person that the weather tyranny and green energy agenda aren’t just cute or even annoying; they will quite literally kill millions of people with starvation and lack of access to vital goods and services. They are coming for our food and fuel the same way they came for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic. Thus, any promotion of green energy, with its officious regime of government mandates and subsidies, will necessarily ease the death of energy that actually works. So we are all on the same page as conservatives that green energy must be shunned, right?
Wrong! When Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, said recently that “California is in the lead” on energy and “can show the rest of the nation how it is done,” she could have said the same thing about Oklahoma. During a confab of the Western Governors Association in Oklahoma City, Governor Stitt bragged about installing carbon-neutral green energy into the Oklahoma electricity grid and how “the number of charging stations spread out along highways can serve thousands of electric vehicles and a plan to create a new hydrogen energy hub will help the nation move away from fossil fuels,” according to the Oklahoman.
In an interview with the prominent local paper after the event, Stitt let the cat out of the bag as to why he is all in on green energy, revealing the likely culprit for why Republicans betray us on almost every other important issue. “Most Republican governors would not tackle that, but as a business person ... you're looking at where the investments are heading," said Stitt.
Points for honesty! And Stitt is not wrong. All the money is indeed with the bad guys. The money is with the Great Reset, open borders, pro-criminal policies, corporate welfare, biomedical tyranny, and green energy. Thus, if you ever wondered why Republicans refuse to hold Democrats accountable – even when their policies are so destructive and unpopular – follow the money. Or as Stitt would say, the “investments.”
At a time when we are confronted with an intractable fight for our way of life and need an opposing party to break the paradigm of the federal government working with the ESG “sustainable growth” and “Agenda 2030,” governors like Stitt believe in the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Yet the only reason we can’t beat them is because Stitt and other GOP governors have already decided to join the bad guys.
The Oklahoman explains Stitt’s feelings based on their interview as follows:
For Stitt, the growing electric car market is one he wants Oklahoma to tap into.
“The investments are heading to electric vehicle manufacturing, battery manufacturing technology, alternative (energies),” Stitt said.
Stitt has pushed for the state to spend billions of dollars in tax incentives for the electric vehicle industry, including nearly $700 million the governor got lawmakers to approve this year in hopes that Pansonic would bring an electric vehicle battery plant.
In other words, the very corporate welfare that has allowed government to artificially promote expensive and ineffective energy policies that now leave us with a crisis of our way of life is fully embraced in Oklahoma, just like in California.
Stitt will defend himself by saying that unlike in California, he still supports oil and gas alongside fake energy. But the problem with this “all of the above approach” is that given that Democrats are artificially imposing blocks on oil and gas and spurs on electric cars, wind power, and solar power, any tendentious treatment of green energy by Stitt will only help grease the skids of the “Net Zero” carbon agenda.
Perhaps if Stitt were in charge of the world, the green energy subsidies wouldn’t be as much of a threat to energy that actually works. But given that he is enabling an illusory replacement of fossil fuels, it will allow the globalists to more easily destroy the fossil fuel industry altogether, while making us reliant on wind and solar, which aren’t reliable, and electric cars, which are not only more expensive, but dependent on so many natural resources that have become scarce and expensive as a result of the Great Reset. The shortage of lithium, cobalt, and magnesium will make electric vehicles impractical, and the relative scarcity of copper and aluminum needed for the wind turbines will also make wind an expensive boondoggle for the little energy it produces. Oh, and let’s not forgot all the oil and gas needed to produce the supply chain of most of these “alternative” energy products.
Stitt brags about Oklahoma getting 35% of its electricity from wind, but the free market did not drive that outcome and never would have. Transitioning to green energy will further ease the left’s plan to destroy fossil fuels and leave us with unreliable energy. Would he celebrate a grid built upon 100% wind power? What will that look like when the air is calm, the sun goes down, but the illusion of the transition allowed the left to wipe fossil fuels off the map?
While Stitt brags about wind energy, he refuses to learn the lesson from south of his border when Texas’ grid failed thanks to that transition to “new technology,” as Stitt fondly refers to solar and wind. Rather than spending the money on energy that actually works, “red” Texas invested $66 billion in solar and wind to each compensate for each other’s failures (solar during dead wind and wind during the night). Texas became the leader of green energy long before California. Yet that did nothing for Texans during the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021, which cost billions of dollars and nearly 200 lives. This past summer, according to Bloomberg, the Texas grid had to operate “at a historic pace, often forcing them to put off maintenance to keep cranking out electricity.” Imagine if a fraction of the $66 billion had been invested in energy that actually energizes the world rather than in sources than need help from other energy to produce a fraction of the output at a higher cost.
Thus, boasting about shifting reliance from fossil fuels or nuclear energy to green energy is akin to making someone more reliant on a bike than a car for transportation. Which is exactly what they want to do. The more they use a carrot-and-stick approach to prop up fake energy, the more they box out real energy in a circuitous cycle of failure, dependency, higher prices, and scarcity of product, which feeds on itself in perpetuity.
To add insult to injury, Stitt wants to follow the California example of weakening the grid with ineffective energy sources and then further straining it buy promoting electric vehicles, which drive up the demand for electricity, thereby ensuring that the only cars on the road in his dystopian vision won’t be able to reliably run, even after paying a fortune for the purchase.
There’s a broader lesson not just in the fact that a prominent Republican governor has embraced the green energy Agenda 2030 but in the reason why he has embraced it. Stitt believes that we must “invest” in the strong players on the block. Well, the strong players on the block are not the forces of freedom that respect life, liberty, property, and the continuity of the human species in the way we understand it. The strong players are those who want us without cars, without detached homes, without abundant food and medicine, and completely reliant upon government for basic needs while eating bugs, groveling for rationed food, energy, and medicine, and having our bodies, minds, and souls constantly surveilled, if not downright controlled. This is where the money is. This is the “wave of the future.”
Roth: Deliberately lessening America's energy is self-destruction, period.
Air conditioning is one of the most American things I can think of, other than perhaps ice cubes, which accomplish a related function. While people throughout Europe and other developed and emerging countries sweat and suffer through sweltering hot — and sometimes mildly hot — days and drink warm water and carbonated beverages, Americans have the freedom to choose not to do so.
Which is why it is all the more outrageous that some Americans are being asked to ration their air conditioning and other energy use — the energy that keeps Americans cool, productive, and happy, while also serving an important function in preventing illness and death from excessive heat.
The progressive central planning obsession with energy is fraught with fantasy outweighing reality. Now Americans are being asked, and in some cases forced, to sacrifice their individual health and well-being for this fantasy.
Across the country, natural gas and coal power sources have been shut down, lessening the supply of energy, which becomes very apparent during times of heavy energy demand, such as very hot days. Wind and solar power are both intermittent (that is, not generating power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining), and we have not scaled batteries or other storage in a way that makes these viable substitutes. And that doesn’t even account for their inherent downsides, either.
In California, the California Independent System Operator, which is the manager of the state’s electric power grid, has issued a voluntary call for energy conservation during the hours of 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. — you know, the hours when people are home from work and school and want to relax and enjoy time with the family. Suggestions to conserve energy include not running the air conditioning and major appliances.
This is because the state does not have enough energy production. Nor does the country. And there isn’t enough energy production because of an irresponsible movement away from traditional energy sources without a viable alternative to meet demand. Period.
It’s not as though California has had to enact forced blackouts in prior years to deal with demand and couldn’t have seen this coming (sarcasm intended).
But it’s not just California. Even in Texas, calls for rationing are happening. This summer, Tesla asked customers not to charge their electric vehicles during peak energy demand hours (between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.) amids concerns over an energy emergency.
Well, that seems to bode well for the coordinated push for more electric vehicles (again, sarcasm intended). It’s almost as though a whole lot of people want to deny how most electricity in the U.S. is powered.
Across the pond, Europeans are faring worse and are likely facing a winter filled with heavy rationing of energy — or worse. In Germany, it was reported by Insider that landlords have already begun rationing hot water. This may become another instance where lives are at stake, especially if heat gets rationed.
This is self-destruction, plain and simple, and we should not be following suit.
The United States fought and won a few wars so that we don't have to listen to the whims and directives of those residing across the pond. Whether it is other European countries’ bad economic ideas or the rantings of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, we should be rejecting their lunacy and remembering why America has been the most powerful and broadly admired country in the world. Yet, over time, we have been turning into Europe. More socialism, more progressive nonsense, and a bigger government and ruling class with more central planning have been to our detriment.
While we listen to and ally with the European lunacy, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are continuing to follow their own path, becoming more powerful and potentially allying, to our future detriment. Our own foolhardy decisions are handing them more and more opportunities.
It’s time to return to American principles, American ingenuity, and American energy. The people who want to embrace the socialist trappings of Europe have plenty of choices across the pond in which to do so. Leave America alone and let America prosper.Today's top stories
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