Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

George Rebane

The true costs of ‘renewable energy’ are both unaffordable and hidden. Those of us who can do arithmetic have known the unreported high costs of renewable wind and solar power for years, and how the climate calamity acolytes and the lamestream have suppressed reporting the costs of making the world work with renewable energy.  Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute writes a short, fact-filled piece on the matter in the 6aug19 WSJ (here).  He cites the work of the International Renewable Energy Institute based on the demand forecasts of the International Energy Agency.  The bottom line is that if you take into account the ‘cradle to grave’ costs and environmental impacts of spreading solar and wind power production worldwide, then humanity will have an existential disaster on its hands.  The amount of mining, transport, construction, and waste elimination required swamps all conceivable benefits from such ‘clean power’ which will turn out to be the dirtiest and most expensive that we can attempt to buy.  As an example, “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.  And these materials will have to be mined, manufactured, and assembled in not so very nice places according to the Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future.  None of this is known to our garden-variety progressives (some in these pages) who continue to mindlessly tout subsidized ‘clean energy’ and claim its unrealizable economic benefits.

‘1984’ has arrived on campuses.  “Bias response teams” are now an established institution on most college campuses, and the disease is spreading rapidly.  Christian Schneider reports (here) on “a chilling look inside colleges’ systems for reporting and policing offensive speech.”  The growing archive of such petty incidences of one student snitching on another, often unsuspecting, student is testimony to another of the progressive-promoted illiberal insanities in our society.  Reading the record of cited incidences is simply mind-boggling to most of us.  The accused offenders are then required to present themselves to the schools’ administrative “diversity” panels for examination of their violations.  As with sexual abuse allegations, there is no appeals process, and such allegations go on the students’ records which may later be used to impact careers and other life-opportunities in these looney tunes times.  For all this, go thank your local leftists who have enthusiastically made all this possible, and continue to do so with every ballot they mark.

[update]  Tonight on FN we saw an ugly leftwing mob assembled across the street from Majority Leader McConnell’s house with signs and flood lights screaming unspeakable epithets at the senator and people to “Stab him through the heart!” and “Cut his fucking throat!”.  How many lamestream outlets showed this?  How many rightwingers have gathered to put on a scene like that in front of Democrat politician’s house?  Biden and Booker both stated that they want to “beat up” President Trump; how many Republican politicians have ever come even close to such violent language against a Democrat President.  And none of these are isolated incidents carried out by some backwater communists, these are carried out regularly by mainstream leftists all across the country.  In progressive circles and in their lapdog lamestream media President Trump is regularly referred to as a “white supremacist”.  Where is the evidence for that?  I join with Victor Davis Hanson and most other conservative commentators in declaring that I have never met a rightwing white supremacist, nor do I know of anyone who has ever met such a person.  Yet the lunatic Left continues to accuse all of us daily of being white supremacists.  (check RR comment streams)  It is these insanely cynical asymmetries that confirm our having passed the tipping point and promoting the Great Divide.

[8aug19 update]  To further confirm the tsunami of censoring conservatives that is sweeping the country’s media, Twitter concluded that the video I reference above was too damaging to the progressive narrative about who actually are purveyors of hate and violence.  CNBC reports that “Twitter locked Mitch McConnell's campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, for posting a video of a profanity-laden protest outside of McConnell's home in Louisville, Kentucky.”  (more here)  You literally cannot make this stuff up – politically motivated censorship is now a daily happening, most of it not visible.

[10aug19 update]  ‘Shaming’, even FN doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, and plays patsy to the Dem candidates’ attempt at that in their desperate attempts to intimidate President Trump.  These political sleazebags, now joined by Uncle Joe, are all claiming a direct causal relationship between Trump’s public speech and the El Paso and Dayton killings.  This is supposed to shame the president.  People who still care about the language know that a person accepts shame only when 1) he acknowledges the veracity of the allegations against him, AND 2) the society around him also embraces the same allegations.  Neither of those conditions exist for Trump re the massacres, nor the 100M+ Americans who are paying attention.  The desperate scumbags who seek to make such ludicrous claims stick don’t have a clue about this, and are mainly relying on the segment of their constituents who are innocent of current events and most other things that quality education delivers.

[11aug19 update]  Leftwing dumb is definitely a terminal mindset. Any kind of discussion with them is nigh impossible because they fail the basics of an IQ test that asks questions about whether this is like that, and if not, what is the difference.  Years of examples of such deficit thinking are archived in RR comment streams, and today we see it in the comments under Jo Ann’s recent Union piece (here) about the treatment LaMalfa received at the hands of the leftists when he visited here.  The Union leftwing commenters equate the crowd’s cries of ‘Lock her up!’ at Trump rallies with their own thuggish behavior of shouting down a congressman of the opposite party.  They haven’t a clue that one set of voices is in support of the speaker, and the other set of voices is meant to disrupt a speaker trying to respond to his audience.  To those pinheads these two situations are identical, and they consider their loutish behavior as Democrats to be a proper response to the Republican audience’s behavior at a Republican rally.  Is there someone with even garden variety smarts on the other side who can see a profound difference here?  Exit question: how often do you see Republicans do that when a Democrat comes to speak?  (I don't usually comment on Jo Ann's columns, but this time the number of butt-stupid responses was overwhelming.  H/T to GregG and ToddJ for their valiant attempts to explain the matter in that comment stream.)

Comments

[Bill Tozer]

Re: Update

How low can they go?

[Bill Tozer]

Re: The true cost of ‘renewable’ energy are both unaffordable and hidden.

Batteries: Let’s not forget costs and carbon footprint with the mining of lithium, cobalt, and nickel, not to mention the transportation and manufacturing carbon footprints of much items.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact

https://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/17435/Will-Your-Electric-Car-Save-the-World-or-Wreck-It.aspx

“Batteries powering electric vehicles are forecast to make up 90% of the lithium-ion battery market by 2025. They are the main reason why electric vehicles can generate more carbon emissions over their lifecycle – from procurement of raw materials to manufacturing, use and recycling – than petrol or diesel cars. Three factors account for this.”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/battery-batteries-electric-cars-carbon-sustainable-power-energy/

[Bill Tozer]

1984 on campus

http://dlvr.it/R9rk28

[fish]

Don't ever believe that the lefts "anti-violence" advocates are against violence or that Twitters™ public embrace of "Free Speech" has anything to do with free speech.

"Just Stab The Motherfu*ker": Twitter Suspends McConnell Campaign For Posting Video Of Violent Threats

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-08/just-stab-motherfuker-heart-twitter-suspends-mcconnell-campaign-posting-video

[Bill Tozer]

Michael Moore discovers the truth.....the inconvenient truth.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/08/08/michael-moore-backed-doc-planet-of-the-humans-tackles-false-promises-of-green-energy/?

[Bill Tozer]

Aug 11 update:

I, too, do not comment on JoAnne’s columns as a rule. I don’t want my comments to be taken as Jo Anne’s guilt by association with me. Some of us have reputations that precede us and I did not wish to slurry her good name. :). I might comment as I reread the column and finally got around to reading the Union’s story on La Malfa’s visit to GV. As one commentator (Gregory?) remarked, how do you reconcile the two; JoAnne’s column and the Union’s reporting of the Congressman’s appearance in Western Nevada County?

With that said, saw this short link below and maybe it fits. It’s a question I have been asking myself for a few months. The Left declares that the problem is Trump and insinuates once Trump is removed from the scene, things will get back to normal. I seriously doubt that. They have got a taste of behavior that crosses so many lines at so many levels and they like it. They like it too much. Now they crave, being addicted to outrage. They are junkies and crave more.
Political life has become one big Kavanaugh hearing busting out of the former hallowed halls of the one deliberative body, the Senate. The witch hunt is on and has spread well beyond Salem into facets of life where it does not belong nor formerly resided. No boundaries now. No putting the brakes on and no signs of running out of gas.

“National discourse has gone insane. Partisans now view the other side as bad, the enemy or evil, not just opponents. What about those of us with friends across the divide? These days, there seems to be no home in politics for people who have principles and values but are willing to say that their own side might be wrong and neither side should give into hate. There is this sense there may be no going back to normalcy. We should all be troubled by that.”

https://www.creators.com/read/erick-erickson

The new normal? Hell yes.

[Bill Tozer]

#FakeEnergy Renewables

“Forget all you have heard about how “Renewable Energy” is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.”

Texas had a taste of this economic damage earlier this week when electricity prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt hour — the result of a combination of extreme heat and the increased dependency of the grid to erratic, unpredictable, unreliable wind power.

This week’s price spikes also underscore how dependent the region’s power grid has become on wind farms, which now make up about a quarter of the generation capacity in Texas. Lackluster breezes have contributed to the higher prices, Hehir said.

Wind power generation in the region has plunged for three straight days, grid data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Britain, too, has had its share of renewables-induced misery when it recently experienced its worst black-out in years.

As Paul Homewood notes, the two companies responsible for the power outage — one a gas-powered station belonging to German owned RWE, the other a monstrously inefficient wind farm owned by Oersted (formerly DONG) — are acting like the black-out never happened. Presumably, they are relying on the likely possibility that the inquiry into the incident will be a whitewash.

What we do know is that people who understand the problems with renewable energy have been predicting these black-outs and brown-outs for years.

To repeat what the great Christopher Booker wrote in 2009 of the impending renewables disaster:

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out.

That’s because, as we saw in South Australia, power cuts are a feature — not a bug — of electricity grids heavily dependent on renewable energy. The Australian government is now suing wind farm operators over the 2016 South Australian blackout — because they allegedly failed to meet their performance requirements.

Powerful though they are, the economic and environmental arguments against the wind industry have done little to stall the dash for renewables in many Western countries. That’s because the wind industry is a perfect storm of moral corruption and vested interests in which the very people who ought to be opposing it — capitalists and environmentalists — are the ones with their snouts deepest in the trough. Greenies love renewables for ideological reasons. Capitalists — the crony variety — because of the vast subsidies.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/08/17/delingpole-donald-batman-trump-michael-joker-moore-join-forces-fake-energy-renewables/?