Climate Change and Capitalism

Clifford A. Brown: AG Barr: Microbes Are the Real Threat, Not Climate Change

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I used to know, but I forgot.

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Part of the developing liberal media narrative about COVID-19 pandemic is that black people are disproportionately impacted by the disease. The usual explanation for this is that black people have more “underlying conditions” — heart disease, Type II diabetes, etc. — that so often make the difference between having a mild case of coronavirus and having a serious case that might kill you. What goes unmentioned in such explanations is that black people are also disproportionately likely to live in high-density urban areas and to use public transportation. Why do you think New York City became such a death trap in this pandemic? Millions of people ride the subway there every day, and the city’s population density is the highest in America. Because urban life is also highly correlated with voting Democrat, the Chinese virus also has a partisan bias. Republican voters tend to live in suburbs, small towns and rural areas, regions where the COVID-19 infection rate is lower. A “stay-at-home” order will help reduce the spread of a contagious disease far more effectively if you live in a single-family home than if you live in a crowded apartment complex, and so the residential patterns of Democrats are part of the risk patterns that have political consequences.

Climate projections may have ignored the world’s secret weapon against climate change

Awakening volcanic region in Iceland ‘could cause disruption for centuries’  The Guardian.

Volcanic activity is escalating in Icelandic region and could cause disruption for CENTURIES  Dail Mail.

Study: Climate Change to cause“Abrupt Biodiversity Loss” by 2030

Coral Catastrophes Imagined

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I’m tempted to suggest that the feel-good news story of the week is “UN To Run Out of Money by End of Month, Secretary General Warns.” Aww, wouldn’t that be a shame.

But no, by far the the best stand-up-and-cheer-for-‘Murica story this week is “Team Allegedly Sets New ‘Cannonball Run’ Record on Empty Highways During Coronavirus Lockdown.” Now that’s making the best of the bad situation, American-style! Me, I’m getting three weeks to the gallon on my car right now, and so admire and envy the lust for speed on the open road.

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America is the most mobile society in history, but our transportation system is on the verge of collapse. Traffic congestion is today five times greater than it was 25 years ago, yet many transportation plans and projects are making it worse. As Randal O’Toole reveals in Gridlock, the prime causes of our ailing system are a government transportation planning philosophy whose primary goal is to diminish auto use—hence, personal mobility—in combination with federal budget incentives that perversely encourage transportation planners to increase congestion. As a result, the automobile which is accessible to almost every family in the nation and provides unparalleled access to better housing, low??cost consumer goods, a choice??driven affordable life, and freedom—is being deliberately forced off the transportation grid by the expensive “solution” of little??used high??speed trains and urban transit lines.

A blast from the past (2008).

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Maher is one of the most inconsistent human beings in existence — half of the time he is a deranged proglodyte, and the other half of the time he is a rational adult, and you can never predict which one you’re going to get.

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In “Who Wants to Play the Status Game?,” her Jan. 16 column at The Point, Agnes Callard, an academic philosopher at the University of Chicago, makes some interesting observations and claims. Like doctors, lawyers, and indeed the entire range of ambitious human beings, academics often find it difficult to tolerate the next fellow’s social distinction and the egotism that accompanies it. “‘Look at me,’” said Bertrand Russell, who was not a very modest man, “is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart.” But having looked at you who are so special, others may be filled with envy and resentment, nor is there anything human psychology loathes more than the judgment (especially when it’s accurate): “That person is better than me.” Hence the need for certain leveling games that serve as a kind of indispensable moral (or pseudo-moral) social glue.

If you look at Underclass people, they all have LOOK AT ME plastered all over them, from fancy decorated fingernails and bizarre tattoos to pink hair and uncomfortable  but striking clothing. Such people don’t have a lot of control over what happens to them in life so they tend to focus on the little that they actually do control, their appearance (and often their political twitches). Pretty sad, really.

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In my private life, I expressed my love for passenger trains by helping to restore the SP&S 700 steam locomotive and several passenger cars; buying (but never really doing anything with) some model trains; collecting railroad memorabilia; building a library of hundreds of books on passenger trains and railroad history; and joining dozens of rail history societies and museums. None of these things were as satisfying as riding the trains themselves, so whenever I had an opportunity I rode tourist trains such as the White Pass & Yukon and Cumbres & Toltec.

Watching people realize that the models were never intended to tell you the future, they were only intended to persuade, is a really a big mind-effer, if you know what I mean. And a lot of people are waking up into a new reality, in which they realize that the so-called experts certainly know more than we do — I’m not saying you should ignore experts —  but you can’t trust them to give it to you straight when that doesn’t work.

— Scott Adams

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One of the most effective tools in the arsenal of any MSM hack is to brand information questioning or contradicting the official narrative as a dangerous ‘conspiracy theory’. Keep in mind, many of the same writers who accused Zero Hedge of promoting ‘conspiracy theories’ about a possible connection between the novel coronavirus and a nearby bioweapons lab – contributing to a permanent suspension from Twitter, a social media org which purports to be a ‘marketplace of ideas’ free of political bias – shamelessly promoted the false ‘Trump-Russia’ conspiracy for years.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

John Derbyshire.

We all live on the same planet, to be sure, and we have common concerns in areas like, oh, public health. But making your country dependent on a geopolitical rival for some high proportion of your medications, or key manufacturing processes, is seriously stupid.

The unholy alliance of covid-19, nationalism, and climate change  Women and minorities hardest hit.

Global Pandemic Doesn’t Stop Jane Fonda’s Climate Hysteria  Why would it?

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The stakes could not be higher. On the table are not just millions of lives and many billions of dollars and renminbi but perhaps a century’s worth of geo-political power and status. If science is the exit to the lockdown forced upon the world by Covid-19, then a working vaccine holds the most likely key to the door.

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They’re fundraising on Easter weekend during a national shutdown in which many people are missing paychecks and maybe seeing their businesses go bankrupt?

Bold call, Cotton. Let’s see how that goes.

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Apparently, liberals have an alternative reality built up in their minds where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in 2016 and now is an amazing president.

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Someone who had specific information that the CDC did not was Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an expert in infectious diseases in Seattle. In an excellent New York Times news story on March 10, reporters Sheri Fink and Mike Baker tell the tragic tale. As a result of her months-long research in the flu, Dr. Chu and her colleagues had a collection of nasal swabs from people experiencing symptoms. She spent weeks trying to get permission from state and federal officials to test the swabs for the coronavirus. They turned her down. The CDC told her on February 16 that if she wanted to use her test as a screening tool, she would need permission from the Food and Drug Administration. But because of regulations put in place by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the FDA could not approve. Finally on February 25, in desperation, she and her colleagues did the tests without approval. And bingo: she found a positive test for a teenager who had not recently traveled. But for the regulation, she could have known this weeks earlier. And did the FDA see the error of its ways and give her credit? No. Dr. Scott Lindquist, Washington state’s epidemiologist for communicable diseases, says, “What they [the CDC and the FDA] said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu. Stop testing.”

As often happens, government is the problem, not the solution; the people we hired to fix such problems just make them worse.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Welcome to the Shibbolithic

Oh, But We’re Anti-Science? Climate Change Zealots Harrelson, Cusack Push Crackpot ‘5G’ Theory

Radical Environmentalists’ Giddiness During Pandemic Exposes Their True Aims

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As the world has slowed down to stave off the spread of COVID-19, stories of wild animals tromping into now-quiet city streets have gone viral online. Some of these turned out to be completely made-up, including the dolphins supposedly swimming through Venice canals or the elephants getting drunk on corn wine in a Chinese farming village.

But there are also plenty of very real sightings of animals you might not expect in the urban jungle. Coyotes have been spotted throughout San Francisco, even taking naps in patches of green spaces in the city. In the coastal Welsh town of Llandudno, a herd of mountain goats stomped through the streets, munching on vegetation and climbing walls. In Boulder, Colorado, mountain lions have been prowling residential streets—one even took a nap in a backyard tree.

Pope: Coronavirus May Be ‘Nature’s Response’ to Climate Change

Babylon Bee.

Think about it.

The Conversation: “Sorry to disappoint climate deniers, but coronavirus makes the low-carbon transition more urgent”

IP: Award-Winning Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Fred Singer Dies – Pioneering Scientist & The Dean of Climate Skeptical Scientists

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It worked for the Athenians, who invented political democracy.

Wouldn’t you rather have a plumber or an electrician as Speaker rather than Nancy Pelosi?

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The Democrats are hysterically blaming President Trump for the fact that the Wuhan virus is killing some Americans. No doubt, they also will blame Trump for the recession that will be caused, not by the virus, but by government’s reaction–overreaction, in my opinion–to the virus.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #405

Science team points out a new failure of climate models

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Apparently the U.S. exists to subsidize the inhabitants of the turd world, both here and abroad.  Glad we cleared that up.

ZMan pokes at some illusions.

In recent years, this thirst for universal equality has turned into a weird cargo cult, where simply making people appear equal will cause universal equality to spring forth. You see a bit of that in the National Review post. The author seems to be hoping the virus is a great plague that hits the elites as hard as everyone. In the midst of the suffering, so the thinking goes, everyone will suddenly embrace the equality of man. Only a fanatic can believe that he not so subtly hopes for a plague.

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Contrary to what almost everyone has said during the last three months – from media talking heads to presidents and epidemiologists and your neighbor – the growth of pandemics is not exponential. The number of people infected and number of dead don’t follow “exponential” curves. They follow S-shaped curves.

An S-shaped curve is initially like an exponential curve, before it stagnates and levels off. What we’re arguing over is when exactly this exponential phase will end, and what we might be able to do to bring that fortuitous event closer.

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We have posted several contributions by our friend Brian Sullivan. Brian is a serial entrepreneur who founded and now runs a cutting-edge cancer research company. He is an exceptionally able man in several respects; among other things, he understands mathematics. Unlike, apparently, every journalist in the United States. Brian has been analyzing international data on COVID-19 and has come to some striking conclusions.

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Everything related to the coronavirus shutdown of the country is guided, in large part, by projected deaths and hospitalizations. But what if the computer models are wrong, way wrong? We look at what one of the most prominent models said would be the number of hospital beds and ICU units needed at this point and compare it to what the actual number for both of those are and speculate as to why there is such a huge discrepancy between the two.

The Guardian: Can we Rescue the Great Barrier Reef?

Here’s Why Californians Are Getting Reamed At The Gas Pump Despite Rock-Bottom Oil Prices  Prices are always higher in a People’s Republic.

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There’s no proof the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a laboratory, but we can’t take the Chinese government’s denials at face value.

Former UN Climate Action Leader on Covid-19: “Moments of crisis are always moments of opportunity”

Mencius Moldbug weighs in.

The terrible truth the virus has revealed is that the US and UK — as opposed to post-Communist Asia and post-Napoleonic Europe — are not even countries. They are free-trade zones. Our governments are not governments. They are bureaucratic anarchies with ceremonial elected monarchs. Pitting them against this ruthlessly objective virus is sending Don Quixote to Vietnam.

…

Anyone repeating lines like “the Trump administration has failed” is spreading an Orwellian lie. There is no “Trump administration.” There is an elected showman and his cronies, fronting for an unaccountable permanent government. The celebrities are neither in charge of the bureaucrats, nor deserve to be. Anyone can be excused for thinking either team is worse than the other. No one can be excused for confusing the two.

COP26 Delay: Climate Activists Hopeful They’ll Have New President in the White House

OOPS! MarketWatch Falls Prey to Climate Change April Fools’ Day Prank

NYT’s Friedman Spews Trump Climate Change Response Could Be ‘More Destructive’ than Virus Response

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Today, instead of reusing the free single-use bags to line their trash cans and dispose of their cat litter, Californians now pay 10 cents every time they exercise that privilege. And how does this help the environment, when reusable plastic bags have 11 to 14 times the mass of disposable plastic bags, and hardly anyone reuses them that many times?

Further evidence of the absurdity of laws banning single-use plastic bags is found in a study commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Environmental Agency, which estimated reusable grocery bags made of cotton fabric to have 131 times greater “global warming potential” than conventional disposable plastic bags.

Climate Research Universities Unite to Accelerate Action

San Francisco Reverses Ban On Single-Use Plastic Bags, Prohibits Reusable Totes

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The problem appears to be that our economy is much more complicated than you had imagined.

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Contrary to what you may have heard from the ‘news media’.