Whoof, that was some truly deranged reporting by The New York Times the other day on “How Republicans Are ‘Weaponizing’ Public Office Against Climate Action,” painting an evil conspiracy of Republican state treasurers “to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to reduce greenhouse gases.” [bold, links added]
Yes, a bunch of GOP officials are fighting back against the progressive drive “to use government muscle and public funds” to destroy carbon-based fuel industries — and against banks and investment firms that are using their power to the same end.
And the Republicans are working with think tanks, nonprofits, and so on in this effort.
Exactly as Democrats have long been doing on their side. Just for starters, the New York city and state comptrollers boast of their anti-carbon strategies for investing huge pension funds, as do other Dems in similar jobs across the nation.
Heck, Mike Bloomberg has been sending millions to state Attorney General offices to fund special units to sue oil, gas, and coal companies. That’s far more of an offense against good government than anything The Times uncovered.
Lefties generally think it’s awesome when they leverage government power to their ends, whether it’s dubious anti-carbon use of pension funds etc., or all those silly “state travel bans” that have taken off in recent years, mostly targeting other states whose school trans-bathroom policies don’t toe the progressive line.
Heck, California Gov. Gavin Newsom just told Hollywood it should stop filming in politically incorrect states. (Lucky for “Ozark” that the series already wrapped.)
The Times’ bias is breathtakingly clueless: Its reporters and editors seem unaware of, for example, the serious financial-governance arguments against the drive to “make companies disclose climate risk” — which in fact is about trying to force them to do business on the assumption that the most extreme climate-change scenarios are certain, and so ignore what the best climate science actually says.
Which, incidentally, is that if we do nothing more about global warming, the planet will warm a couple of degrees and the seas will rise a bit . . . and humanity will still be far better off at century’s end than it is now.
Climate change simply isn’t remotely catastrophic, and treating it as such does serious harm (just fill your tank up for a small taste).
Plus, the entire West can go carbon-neutral by 2030 and it still won’t prevent global emissions from hitting what the greens call a disaster, because China, India, and the rest of the developing world aren’t on board: They’re building coal plants faster than we can close them.
But the mention of these facts is verboten in The Times newsroom, and in all too many other elite institutions.
That ignorance leaves The Times’ reporters and editors clueless about the domestic politics, too — and so they see a bunch of Republican politicians and conservative think-tankers beginning to fight back against Democratic and lefty pressure campaigns as some vast new violation of the nation’s norms.
Read more at NY Post
Politicians and “journalists” have no clue about the sciences of the environment (biology) OR of climate. And their ignorance is frightening schoolchildren with unjustified anxiety. AND NOW, several hundred billion dollars in wasted effort and pain at the pumps and grocery stores. First, 0.04% of the atmosphere CO2 is ESSENTIAL FOR LIFE ON EARTH. Any level below 2,000ppm is a STARVATION LEVEL LOW. That’s why greenhouse growers add up to four times our current levels of CO2 to make their plants the best they can be. Life, all life, was born in life luxuriant concentrations of CO2 more than twenty times today’s levels. CO2 is insignificant in climate, in spite of all the uneducated histrionics. The doomsayers indoctrinating schoolchildren continue to base their visions of doom based on the over 100 CO2 driven climate models. WHICH ALL UNIVERSALLY FAIL BY OVERESTIMATING WARMING! (Drs. John Christy and Roy Spencer are the experts on this.) Climate is not static. It follows two natural cycles and has done for the ongoing three million year Pleistocene/Quaternary Ice Age. The long, one hundred thousand year Milankovitch Eccentricity cycle. During which earth’s temperatures rise and fall TWELVE DEGREES C. And during which about 85 thousand years are spent in deadly cold glacial phases. And during which about 15 thousand years of each cycle are spent in warm, more productive interglacial phases. We call our current ongoing interglacial phase the Holocene. We invented agriculture and civilization in this one. Within each interglacial, temps warm and cool naturally about four degrees C every nine hundred years. The latest iteration of what Dr. Judith Curry calls nine hundred year “Eddy” cycles has had us warming since one hundred years before the invention of the thermometer. It was so cold that you could ice skate on the Thames River in London. We will continue to warm before temperatures naturally peak. And human beings 450 years from now will look back and see our stupidity. Unprecedented? Hardly. Warming like today’s has happened five hundred times during our current, natural ongoing ice age. By the way, cold kills 50 times the number of people heat does. Live with it. And drop the fear. You’re scaring the kids.
The NYT’s has been Fake News ever since 1932 when covered up for Stalin later they covered up for Hitler they have covered up for Castro the Viet-Cong and are behind this 1619 Project this leftists rag should be on everyone’s Boycott list
Add ending the destruction of our affordable, reliable domestic energy system along with stop scaring the kids…
Investing in companies that wave their ESG flag is a losing strategy. The traditional energy companies are in the drivers seat. We need their products and green energy needs the fossil fuel crutch.
No new pipelines, no new refineries?
That just makes the remaining fossil fuel infrastructure more profitable for the owners. If you choose to invest in things that depend on taxpayers’ subsidies, you are a parasite. Shame on you, fools.
At one it was said we could tell what the Soviet Union was doing by what they accused the West of doing. That is certainly true of the Democrats. With tactics like ESG, taking over pension funds and using them as a weapon, and black listing certain states, democrats are weaponizing public office to force climate action.