Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

President Biden blamed Hurricane Helene on climate change and said anybody who disagreed must be brain dead.

Formerly, hurricane were “acts of God” which Were Not covered under ordinary insurance, special  coverage was required, whereas damage resulting from actions of other people Were covered.

So .  .  .  does this mean all our insurance premiums are going up, because hurricanes are now torts? 

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Uh…lawyers?

Bill Glahn at the Center of the American Experiment tracked energy usage in MInnesota for one hot ugly day, this past Monday:

“Renewables” provide 8% of the energy.

Somehow, though, they’ll be ready to take the entire load (and all those mandated EVs) by 2040?

Reminds me of this classic discourse on solving difficult problems:

I’m going to guess the “miracle”, in this case, will be that everyone involved in setting the policy will be out of government and cashing fat non-profit or lobbying checks by the time energy becomes unaffordable to proles.

British climate protesters who blocked the London beltway get seriously slammed in court:

Obstructing a highway is not simple political expression, and it is far from “peaceful protest.” It involves the physical obstruction of others’ freedom of movement. It is also disruptive and potentially tortious conduct that can have severe consequences. In this case, those seeking to “just stop oil” have done little to advance their cause (traffic congestion results in worse fuel economy and increases emissions), but and managed to cause significant harm to others. From the BBC report:

The action resulted in chaos on the M25 over four successive days, causing nearly 51,000 hours of driver delays, the court heard. The protests closed parts of the motorway in Kent, Surrey, Essex and Hertfordshire.

People missed flights, medical appointments and exams. Two lorries collided, and a police motorcyclist came off his bike during one of the protests on 9 November 2022 while trying to bring traffic to a halt in a “rolling road block”.

Prosecutors alleged the protests led to an economic cost of at least £765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was put at more than £1.1m.

The activsits and their allies also sought to disrupt the trial, but to no avail.

Wonder if Mary Moriarty is paying attention?

Metro Transit and the Strib have put out a “climate conscious newcomers guide to using Metro Transit”.

It’s tempting to snark “they figure out who the real problem is”:

Familiarize yourself with Metro Transit’s code of conduct, a lengthy and often-ignored rule book that mandates such things as keeping non-service animals in carriers, one seat per rider (no manspreading!), and no eating on board.

Those darn Manspreaders! [1].

But later on, they note:

Let’s talk about crime and nuisance behavior aboard transit, particularly the Blue and Green light-rail lines. This usually involves drug use, smoking, harassing, creepy, gross or criminal behavior. Metro Transit says it’s putting more police, private security and “transit rider assistance program” agents on buses and trains. Frequent transit users say they’re noticing these people, but it’s too early to say whether it’s helping.

Oooh, they drive a hard bargain.

I think I’ll help the environment more by staying home.

And not taking a dump on a bus seat while in a drunken stupor.

[1] For whatever reason, I hold anyone who unironically puts “Man-” in front of a verb to create a derogatory term in sneering contempt.

Sunny Hostin on The View: Climate Change caused the eclipse, has brought out the cicadas:

I wonder what “intellectual self-defense” looks like, legally? Because this woman is an immediate danger of destroying or gravely injuring the national intellect.

No – not the Canadian Football League. That still exists, believe it or not.

No – does a nyone out there remember the “compact fluorescent light”, or CFL?It seems like just yesterday when the green mafia wheedled the government into mandating the replacement of the incandescent bulb with the CFL – a miniature fluorescent tube that screws into a light socket and resembles the “poop“ emoji.

People resisted them. They were much more expensive than incandescent bulbs, the light (being a fluorescent tube), gave people, headaches, and they were hazardous to dispose of in landfills.

It wasn’t long after that the free market came up with the “LED bulb“ – an adaptation of “light emitting diode“ technology that had been around for decades. it used very little power, it created a much more pleasant brand of light, and it wasn’t toxic waste.

The federal mandate was apparently forgotten. As has been, near as I can tell, the compact fluorescent.

I’m reminded of that when I see how clumsy and ill thought out the governments, current mandate Ridge, the electric vehicle“ is, compared with a potentially much more palatable option, the hydrogen powered car.

Government may have learned something from the CFL fiasco, of course; and that “something“ is most likely not “listen to the free market“. As the Covid lockdowns show us, “strong arming the media and big tech into helping jam acquiescence down” also works.

Speaking for myself?

I”d go back and try to show…

…well, not “the idiots who shut down nuclear power”, so much as the mushy minds that believed them, how much trouble and misery they would eventually cause around the world.

Of course, destroying cornucopia in general is a goal of the totalitarian left. Poor people don’t solve problems – but they do demand strongmen to solve the problems for them.

Minnesota Enviromaists: “We’ve never had a summer like this! This is proof the climate is…

History:

Minnesota Enviromaoists: “Why are you such a racist?”

Spanish environment minister Teresa Ribera…:

1. Took a private jet to a climate conference – her 17th private jet trip of 2023.
2. Took a limousine downtown to get to the conference
3. Stopped a block away from the conference, took out a bike…
4. And rode the last 1-200 yards, as her entourage followed in their government issue “impress the peasants” rides.

It seems to be all the rage among the “progressive” “elites” these days:

Big day for Greta on the blog today, huh?

Sweden has ditched the Greens “100% Renewable” goal, doubled down on nukes:

More than 40 years after the country voted to phase out nuclear power, Sweden is now looking to build more nuclear reactors after its parliament formally abandoned its 100% renewable energy target to meet net-zero by 2045.

“Living close to Russia focuses the mind, and the Swedish people not only wish to join NATO, but also to ground their economy in an energy source, nuclear, that is physically sound and secure, unlike renewables which are neither,” said Dr. John Constable, NZW’s energy director.

This follows close on the utterly unrelated move to bar “Gender-Affirming Care” for minors in Sweden…

…and the Minnesota DFL’s uncritical mad dash to embrace unicorn power and allowing people who can’t buy vape, rent a car, consent to sex, buy a beer or sign a contract to commit to

Some people are hopping up and down about Greta Thunberg’s prediction from five years ago:

Me? I say we’re still on borrowed time from the Ozone Layer, the hole in which (we were told by noted physicist Ted Danson, was going to kill us in 10 years.

Starting in 1988.

Whackjob environmentalist protesters crash a Swedish TV dance show.

Robocam operator scores a two-fer:

Consider my week made.

The University of Helsinki gives climate activist Greta Thunberg an honorary PhD in Theology .

The Babylon Bee should sue for trademark infringement.

Is there anything “climate change” (TM) can’t do?

Like, spawn a zombie apocalypse?

No, it’s no the Babylon Bee:

Of course it’s Berg’s Seventh Law in effect; most adherents to the Religion of Climate are pretty much the Walking Intellectual Dead already.

I was down at the State Capitol yesterday morning for the Gun Owners Lobby Day.

While there, I ran into a bunch of legislator friends, including former Representative, now Senator Eric Lucero.

Who told me this story, which I’m pleased to pass on to all of you now.

Anyone get the impression Senator Mitchell was a “Meteorologist” at a failing small-market TV station before becoming part of the DFL machine?

Maybe Steve Carell studied her before doing “Anchorman?”

Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?

Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.

And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.

Point, free market!

That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.

Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.

We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.

Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.

Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.

Senator Amy Klobuchar thinks the stakes of this election are very, very high:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar was slammed Tuesday for appearing to suggest that voting for Democrats in the November midterm elections could help thwart hurricanes and the effects of climate change.

The evidence is all around us: Democrats not only think their voters are stupid, they are counting on it.

If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?

You were probably right. It’s because people are losing interest in “climate change“:

mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.

The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.

And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.

Poor people don’t solve problems.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

An individual who kills an eagle can be fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in jail. An organization, $200,000. Penalties increase for subsequent offenses.

But a windmill energy company will be paying less than $30,000 each for dead eagles, with no jail at all.

Quite a deal: a bulk discount on dead birds and immunity from imprisonment. I guess that’s the price Mother Nature pays for saving the planet from global warming.

Joe Doakes

I fully (and only partially satirically) expect electric car drivers to get away with traffic tickets for running down pedestrians.

Some exciting news from sunny California… The power of the sun has now been harnessed.

Renewable electricity met just shy of 100% of California’s demand for the first time on Saturday, officials said, much of it from large amounts of solar power produced along Interstate 10, an hour east of the Coachella Valley.

While partygoers celebrated in the blazing sunshine at the Stagecoach music festival, “at 2:50 (p.m.), we reached 99.87 % of load served by all renewables, which broke the previous record,” said Anna Gonzales, spokeswoman for California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit that oversees the state’s bulk electric power system and transmission lines. Solar power provided two-thirds of the amount needed.

It is an achievement. However, Canary Media points out that there’s a bit more to the story…

Understanding the full picture requires first unpacking how CAISO calculated the 97% figure. California’s in-state renewable energy production was calculated as a percentage of energy demand after accounting for transmission losses. This demand figure omits demand met by rooftop solar, which generates power for more than 1 million California customers. Because large hydropower does not qualify for the state’s renewable portfolio standard, it is also not included in this figure.

Another important caveat: The figure does not account for all demand in California, even leaving aside demand met by rooftop solar. CAISO’s system does not include the areas served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, two publicly owned utilities that together make up roughly 10 percent of electricity sales in the state.

April 3 was a big wind and solar day for California, coupled with relatively low demand due to mild spring weather. Across the whole day, wind contributed 24% toward meeting demand and solar contributed 22%, followed by large hydro at 8% and geothermal at 4%. Add in minor contributions from biomass, biogas and small hydro projects, and the total renewable percentage for the day was 61%.

But even on this banner day for renewables, 39% of CAISO’s demand was met by non-renewable sources. And even at the 3:35–3:40 p.m. interval when CAISO hit 97% non-hydro renewables, other power plants in the state were running, including gas, nuclear and hydro facilities.

That means California still burned enough gas to meet about 15% of demand at the same moment that it had enough non-hydro renewable production to meet 97% of demand; again, the excess was exported to other states.

Adding large hydro and nuclear into the CAISO mix during the renewables peak yields a maximum of 107% carbon-free power that day, as shown in the chart below. During the three hours when clean electricity was being produced in excess of demand, California was exporting its carbon-free energy to neighboring states, almost certainly offsetting fossil power.

It’s almost impossible to put enough lipstick on the porcine Biden administration. All the polls are in the crapper and the only numbers that are going up are in the grocery aisles. Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin notes, Biden and the rest of the party are doing their best Thelma and Louise imitation, especially where the environment is concerned: 

The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.

You don’t want to get crosswise of the ol’ 80/20 rule, but somehow the Donks have pulled it off. And it’s got the old Clinton hands up in arms. Back to Kotkin:

Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.

Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.

Now it may surprise those of us in Minnesota that Black Lives Matter is increasingly discredited; Esme Murphy and the KARE Bears haven’t mentioned it much. But it should surprise no one that someone like Stephanie Murphy would lose support of the party apparat; on the bright side, she has thus far avoided being called a Russian operative, but it’s early and she might still get the full Tulsi if she’s not careful. Closer to home, it will be interesting to see how self-styled moderates like Dean “Everyone’s Invited” Phillips navigate the electorate.

There’s a long time between now and November, but it’s difficult to envision a reversal of the trends. One should never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to blow it. Still, the Donks find events in the saddle and all the narrative engineers at their disposal can’t change the prices at Hy-Vee or Holiday. For nearly half a century, Joe Biden has wanted to be president in the worst way. And he’s getting his wish.

When President Brandon talked about the rising price of fuel and the hob that’s playing on the world economy at the big “climate” summit in Scotland…

…I asked myself – has he forgotten that his administration canceled Keystone XL and revoked exploration permits on federal land?

Or is he just assuming that Democrat voters aren’t bright enough to remember it?

Seems like forever ago that Michael Mann published his hockey-stick
graph, Mary Steyn made fun of it in a column for National Review, and
Mann sued for defamation.  The case has lingered for eight years in the
courts, only now entering the ‘discovery’ phase after National Review
was dismissed as a defendant.

Mark Steyn was deposed by Michael Mann’s lawyer.  Steyn uploaded the
transcript here: https://www.steynonline.com/documents/11106.pdf

I suppose reading deposition transcripts isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
but I found it entertaining.  Your mileage may vary.

Joe Doakes

I can’t imagine those lawyers knew what hit them.

I spent a little time watching some of the local TV news and weather drones chattering about Earth Day yesterday.

I know – I forgot to celebrate it, too, right?

And the line among the various weather drones, in noting that pollution is at record lows around the planet, was simultaneously predictable and a crushing face palm;

“it just shows what people can do to Fight climate change when they set their mind to it”

Yes. When the economy slows to a record halt, vaporizing trillions of dollars in personal and institutional wealth, throwing millions/tens of millions, really, into at least short term poverty and possibly much worse, with industries shut down and hundreds of thousands of small businesses vanquished over a little more than six weeks, the air will get a little clean.

Thousands of people have died of Covid19. Thousands more will likely die.

Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, snuffing out a human life of incalculable worth and immense potential.

Well, all of them but one.

One of the casualties is the “Green New Deal”, says Kevin Williamson, as people life with previews of the Green New Deal:

What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy. There are times when that is necessary, and this is one of those times. But emergencies do not last forever, and emergency measures should be, by nature, temporary. The attraction of the climate-change crusade is that it creates a permanent state of emergency. The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.107

One suspects that the people who are missing their paychecks right now, and the ones who worry that they may be missing them soon, are going to need some convincing. The adverse effects of climate change are likely to be significant and may prove severe — as noted, many of our progressive friends insist that they already are. But we have a new point of comparison, and those challenges feel relatively manageable if the alternative is an extended version of the coronavirus shutdown — and no amount of marketing will change the fact that that is precisely what is being advocated.

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

And two trillion dollars of bailout is bad. The Green New Deal is going to cost an order of magnitude and change more. And unlike Covid, it’ll never end.