Politics/Religion Consolidated Megathread Extravaganza

[Oerdin]

They are certainly trying to decrease exposure largely because they predict a big foreclosure crisis and price fall.  They are going to have similar problems with high risk used car loans. A bunch of morons who paid 50% above market rate (compared to before the shortages of cars), got a seven year long used car loan on a car that was five years old to start with, and a high interest rate.  Those morons are going to drop like flies in the current recession.

[Herman]

Norway takes credit for reducing emissions when it sells its natural gas or oil to countries using dirtier sources of fossil fuel, such as coal. If a potential sale would lead to a net reduction in global emissions, Norway claims credit for the difference.



But not Canada. Here Justine sees the only way to save the planet as shutting down the energy industry and paying workers to transition to installing solar panels or learning to write code for the next Angry Birds app.

[Oerdin]

Solar panels will not work in most of Canada.  They will never produce enough electricity to offset the amount of carbon spent building them.

[Herman]

Solar panels will not work in most of Canada.  They will never produce enough electricity to offset the amount of carbon spent building them.

Try telling that to Justine.

[Oerdin]

[weebles]

The odd part is many of you never have been and never will be Canadians and yet we got you running scared. ac_umm  

 

[DKG]

The odd part is many of you never have been and never will be Canadians and yet we got you running scared.

That's an odd thing to say.

[DKG]

Interesting take on the so called climate crisis. Let's face it, it is the people who have the biggest carbon footprints and that have no intention of reducing it that say you must give up cheap energy and plastics to save the planet.



Climate Activism Isn't About the Planet. It's About the Boredom of the Bourgeoisie



The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.



Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.



Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS's 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major boEhrlich, who recently turned 90, is in the lucky position to have witnessed the complete failure of all his predictions—only to double down on them in his 60 Minutes interview Ehrlich has been wrong on every public policy issue he pontificated on for almost 60 years, yet the mainstream media still treat him like a modern oracle.



Why?



ok, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.



The best answer to this question comes courtesy of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2019 famously said that, "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right." In other words, no matter what nonsense one spews, as long as it is "morally right," it does not matter what the facts show.



Like the prophet of any religion, Ehrlich is not there to explain the world but to reinforce the upper class's favorite worldview of the imminent end of the world, something that can only be prevented if we fundamentally change the way we live. Of course, by "we," they actually mean "you." It's not the Tesla driving AOC or the jet-setting Stanford professor Ehrlich who will adapt their lifestyles, but the rubes of the working- and middle-class who supposedly eat too much meat, drive too many miles on gas-guzzling cars, or even book the occasional flight to go on vacation.



This was perfectly embodied by climate czar and millionaire John Kerry who took his family's private jet to attend a climate change conference in Iceland in 2019. Asked by journalists how to square his climate activism with the use of private planes, he seemed befuddled; after all, Kerry explained, "it is the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle" against climate change.



Even supposed grass-roots movements like "Just Stop Oil" or "Last Generation" (of "tomato soup on paintings" fame) are in fact funded by millionaires, like Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of legendary oil-tycoon Jean Paul Getty, and the Climate Emergency Fund.



Just like Kerry, Ehrlich, and these other groups are not really interested in solving the problem of climate change—for example, promoting research in technologies like nuclear energy, carbon capture technologies, and means of adaptation. Instead, they with to elevate their struggle to an ersatz-religion that allows them to simultaneously enjoy their wealth and lecture the rest of the world from a position of moral superiority.



They are pouring money into those efforts, as the German journalist Axel Bojanowski pointed out, to a degree that would make the oil lobby blush. At the "Climate Action Summit" in 2018, two dozen billionaire-backed foundations pledged 4 billion dollars for climate-change lobbying. Some of them, like the Hewlett Foundation, are directly funding journalists at the Associated Press for "climate reporting," while foundations associated with the Packard and Rockefeller families have been backing the journalistic endeavor "Covering Climate Now," which "collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories" and is financing hundreds of media outlets.



One would assume that a journalistic class that constantly prides itself on speaking truth to power would object to talking money from billionaires to promote their peculiar interests, but the opposite is the case. And it makes perfect sense, since the contemporary media is ideologically in the same camp as the billionaire class; they enjoy lecturing the rest of society just as much as Ehrlich and his acolytes.



Contrary to the climate extremists and their virtue signals, the world they are trying to create would be devastating for the poorest people on the planet. The elimination of poverty and the improvement of living conditions is only made possible through access to energy in all forms and the petrochemical processes enabled by fossil fuels—the production of fertilizers for food and plastics needed in medical equipment.



[size=150]"Just stopping oil" wouldn't stop climate change as swiftly as it would human life[/size]. To add insult to injury, this activism seems to have no shred of compassion for all the human suffering caused by their pet projects, from child-labor in cobalt mines (needed for batteries) in the Congo to forced labor in the PV production process in China, to the environmental damage caused by lithium mining in Chile.



This isn't about the planet. It's about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. And they don't care who has to pay to alleviate it.

https://www.newsweek.com/climate-activism-isnt-about-planet-its-about-boredom-bourgeoisie-opinion-1773846">https://www.newsweek.com/climate-activi ... on-1773846">https://www.newsweek.com/climate-activism-isnt-about-planet-its-about-boredom-bourgeoisie-opinion-1773846

[DKG]

By far the most important difference between Trump and Biden's declassified docs is the constitutional distinction in the statuses of the two men at the center of this two-pronged saga: Donald Trump was president of the United States, while Joe Biden was merely vice president of the United States during the time that he absconded with classified documents.



That distinction may not seem like a big deal, but from a constitutional perspective, it makes all the difference in the world. The president of the United States  alone  is vested by Article II of the U.S. Constitution with the "executive Power" of the national government. This prosaic textual truism forms the crux of what constitutional lawyers -- who, being lawyers, make things seem more complicated than they really are -- refer to as "unitary executive theory." The vice president of the United States, in fact, possesses no more "executive Power" than does a Cabinet official, a White House janitor, or even a reader of this column.



But the timing of the leak from various federal law enforcement actors now, just as Biden is beginning his second half of his term, suggests there is real internal turmoil over at the Democratic National Committee. Perhaps someone at the DNC instructed deep state spooks that now would be a particularly propitious time to leak sordid details to the media. Perhaps someone at the DNC thought that Joe Biden did his job by shepherding his party through the midterms without succumbing to the much-feared "red wave," but that he is now disposable and should be replaced at the ballot in 2024 by Gov. Gavin Newsom

[Herman]

The WEF prog elites spews tons of unnecessary C02 to try and force you to drive less and turn the the thermostat down in your house.



https://www.rebelnews.com/global_elites_are_guilty_of_climate_hypocrisy_by_flying_to_wef_on_private_jetsAccording">https://www.rebelnews.com/global_elites ... sAccording">https://www.rebelnews.com/global_elites_are_guilty_of_climate_hypocrisy_by_flying_to_wef_on_private_jetsAccording to Greenpeace International, 1,040 private jets carried passengers attending the 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF). The traversing private jets created CO2 emissions four times greater than an average week.



"The rich and powerful are swarming to Davos to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors using the most unequal and polluting form of transport: private jets," said Klara Maria Schenk, transport campaigner for Greenpeace's European mobility campaign.  



Dutch environmental consultancy CE Delft uncovered that air traffic for Davos doubled during this year's annual WEF meeting compared to average weeks.



Of these flights, 53% travelled less than 750 km, which travel by train or car could have been an adequate replacement. Another 38% flew shorter distances under 500 km, with the quickest flight a measly 21 km.



The affected flight went from Friedrichshafen (D) to Altenrhein SG — a stone's throw across Lake Constance. The drive would have taken only an hour by car.

[Herman]

187,000 lost jobs in Alberta's oil and gas sector. That's what an explosive new memo out of Ottawa says will be the cost of the Trudeau-NDP coalition's so-called "just transition" plan. It's absolutely devastating, and that's just oil and gas jobs.



The memo, prepared by the federal government, says that they expect Trudeau's "just transition" to cause "significant" disruption to the lives of 2.7 million Canadians working in agriculture, energy, manufacturing and the building and transportation sectors.



Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland will be "disproportionately affected" says the Trudeau government memo.



Danielle Smith and Scott Moe are right, Trudeau's plan isn't about transition at all, it's about eliminating entire sectors of Western Canada's economy and hundreds of thousands of jobs deemed too dirty by the elites in Ottawa.

[Herman]

Jim Crow Joe's dereliction of duty at the Southern border is affecting the American food supply.



https://www.theblaze.com/news/food-security-jeopardized-crops-contaminated-illegal-migrants?utm_source=theblaze-7DayTrendingTest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Afternoon%20Auto%20Trending%207%20Day%20Engaged%202023-01-16&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%207%20Day%20Engagement">https://www.theblaze.com/news/food-secu ... Engagement">https://www.theblaze.com/news/food-security-jeopardized-crops-contaminated-illegal-migrants?utm_source=theblaze-7DayTrendingTest&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Afternoon%20Auto%20Trending%207%20Day%20Engaged%202023-01-16&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%207%20Day%20Engagement

Farmers at the southern border are warning that the country's food security is in jeopardy after the gaps in the U.S.-Mexico border wall have allowed migrants to trespass on farmland and contaminate crops, Fox News reported.



Two farmers in Yuma, Arizona, told the news outlet that the open border has led to a "food safety concern."



From November through March, Yuma supplies 90% of the nation's supply of leafy vegetables, according to the Department of Agriculture. The city generates around 9 billion servings of leafy vegetables per year. However, area farmers say the large gaps in the border wall threaten food production.



According to Customs and Border Protection data, migrant crossings in Yuma increased by 171% between 2021 and 2022. During the Biden presidency, roughly 1 million migrants have crossed Arizona's southern border.



Hank Auza, a fifth-generation farmer with land in Yuma, told Fox News, "Where the gaps are opens up to more farm ground for them to walk across."



"This is the largest humanitarian disaster we've had in this country," Auza said. "And part of the country is happy that it's happening. I don't get why."



When an unauthorized person trespasses on farmland, farmers are forced to destroy the crops in that area in case they are contaminated with pathogens that could lead to illness.



Auza explained that a neighboring farmer had to destroy 10 acres of celery after a group of 30 migrants lived on the field for a week. Auza said that as a result, the farmer lost approximately $100,000.

[Anonymous]

Solar panels will not work in most of Canada.  They will never produce enough electricity to offset the amount of carbon spent building them.

They would work in the Sahara though, I remember seeing a video once where it was shown that it could solve the entire Earth's energy problems.



There was a catch though... the cost of construction was insanely prohibitive, more than the combined finances of the world combined. Additionally, when the change in albedo over such a vast area in Africa was climate modelled, it was discovered that it would totally fuck up the Amazon basin in South America. As in dry it out completely.



Now I'm not one to "trust the science" blindly, but it does occur to me that such a state of affairs ought to be looked at a little more closely, even at the smaller scales that we can achieve. No, I don't want to hear it from some swedish meatball with a face like a slapped arse, something scientific with demonstrated working out will suffice thanks.

[Frood]

Solar farms are massive heat sinks which change the the climate regionally and with enough of them, entire lands and beyond.



And the funny thing? Solar farms require mining intensive enterprises for battery components... powered by fossil fuels..



Greenies are absolute fuckwits.

[DKG]

Solar farms are massive heat sinks which change the the climate regionally and with enough of them, entire lands and beyond.



And the funny thing? Solar farms require mining intensive enterprises for battery components... powered by fossil fuels..



Greenies are absolute fuckwits.

Using wind power to generate the electricity the world needs could also cause a surprising amount of local warming, according to a  study from Harvard co authored by Lee Miller.