Those who believe in a coercive, all-powerful government are preaching the gospel of “green” as the Utopian remedy to, well, everything. Zealously foisted upon the top brass of every military service as well as NASA, the EPA and nearly every other regulatory agency in the United States, it has become a standard underlying dogma even if they can’t field a spokesman to come right out with plain language to justify wildly wasteful expenditures. Instead, they (including the current president himself) subtly blame terrorism on man-made “global warming,” as if wasting enormous sums of money on ineffectual means of energy production will somehow cause bloodthirsty Islamists to chill out.
It may sound preposterous that we should claim that anyone, let alone the U. S. president, would make such a case. But it was only a couple of weeks after the November 2015 Islamic massacre in Paris that he called the climate-change conference there an “act of defiance” against the terrorists. Justifying a $3 billion pledge to “developing countries” (specifically India) to manage the effects of climate-change, he made this unbelievable comment in a CBS interview: “If they are to develop, using let’s say, coal as their main way of generating electricity, with a billion people … you’re looking at an amount of carbon that would mean South Florida’s gone, because the oceans would have risen too high.” If you’ve caught your breath from the hilarity yet, he went on to say this, “You can’t build a border wall when it comes to carbon emissions or global temperatures or the oceans. We’ve got to make sure that people have incentives to work with us.”
Soon after, in his State of the Union address he said, “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change … We’re going to get ISIL, they will be defeated … But if you start seeing the oceans rise by five, six, seven feet …” Yes, we know, food won’t grow and there will be refugees and “dangerous ideologies.” Somehow we’ve got an explosion of jihadist terror throughout the Middle East and often in the West, in spite of the fact that sea levels, if they’ve risen at all, have done so at such a microscopic rate as to be unmeasurable. As to “dangerous ideologies,” they seem to have been well-entrenched since long before the industrial age.
The UN is such an ineffective and marginal outfit that it has hitched its wagon to the “climate-change” dogma, doling out vast sums of money only to “scientists” willing to go so far as to besmirch the underlying basis of science by “adjusting” historical temperature data and constructing fraudulent computer models to predict the earth’s future climate. Hence, the many scandals that have destroyed the reputations of formerly respected science departments. The widely touted “hockey stick” graph was created in the late 1990’s by Michael Mann of the University of Massachusetts. It was proof of man-made global warming, and used by the UN and its funded researchers to insist that governments of developed nations needed to crack down on energy consumption, “carbon emissions,” and consumer habits unfriendly to the environment.
When the “hockey stick” graph was proven erroneous by Canadian scientists Steven McIntire and Ross McKitrick, they couldn’t even find a scientific journal willing to publish their paper. Nevertheless, they were able to use the internet to get their findings out, setting off a series of disputes that continue to the present day –– Mann trying to justify the “hockey stick” despite the (unintentional?) mistakes that plagued his original assertions.
Then came “Climate Gate,” the scandal that caught the science professors of Britain’s University of East Anglia colluding frantically on how to fudge historical temperature data to prove a rapid rise in Earth’s temperature. These scientists, led by Professor Phil Jones and funded by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were desperately trying to find some way to vindicate Michael Mann’s discredited “hockey stick” claims of rapid temperature increases beginning in the early 20th Century. The UK Telegraph dubbed it “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.” Their “work,” along with the discredited “hockey stick” graph, was at the heart of the UN’s IPCC insistence that western governments would have to spend trillions of dollars to reverse a global warming trend that would melt the world’s glaciers, destroy the polar ice caps, and displace millions in the third world who would have to flee starvation, floods and droughts to survive.
Professor Jones and his colleagues were shown, in their own words, to be frantic in their need to hide temperature data from all around the world (they claimed it was lost), create phony computer programs to falsify those records and predict the future and to discredit dissenting scientific studies, making sure they were never included in IPCC findings.
Then was the humorous case of the Australian team who set out toward the waters near Antarctica to document the rapid ice melt caused by global warming. We featured this episode in a previous issue of 21st Century WATCH magazine, but just in case you missed it (as most media outlets managed to do) we couldn’t resist reminding our readers of the incredible irony illustrated by the outcome. While sailing in open waters far from the supposedly melting Antarctic ice zone, the ship found itself encountering unexpected ice, to the point that it was ultimately encased. Unable to break free, calls for rescue went out and an ice-breaker vessel was dispatched. But the freezing conditions proved too much for the ice-breaker, and it too was frozen up, also stranded in impenetrable ice before it could reach the stranded global-warming research team. Too bad we don’t have recordings of what must have been some incredible exchanges between the “warming alarmists” as they faced the possibility of freezing and starvation from their attempt to document the true dangers of global warming!
Our cover this issue features the Ivanpah solar energy farm in California’s Mojave Desert. The operation is owned by Google, NRG Energy and Brightsource. It was largely financed by the taxpayers with $1.6 billion in government loan guarantees. This green energy disaster is still in operation, but only because the state of California has bent the rules to allow additional months to make good after the Ivanpah facility has already breached every contractual promise to state utilities. Not only that, but the conglomerate is failing to make its loan payments despite the fact that the State of California pays the plant nearly five times the going rate for every kilowatt of energy it produces.
The tall towers you see in the photographs have boiler tanks at the top to produce steam. A field of mirrors target the sun’s rays at the boiler tanks, generating steam that powers conventional turbines. But it takes four and a half hours per day of huge generators running on natural gas to get the boilers hot before the sun’s rays can even keep the system working. The natural gas-driven generators would actually be capable of generating a quarter of all the power produced by this “clean energy” miracle. But even at that, the project is failing to produce the promised output.
Ivanpah has blamed an insufficient amount of sunshine for the 35% shortfall in electric power it’s been able to supply to the grid. Critics say that the reduced amount of sunshine has been only nine percent less than the plant’s optimal projections.
The heat generated by the mirrors and boilers incinerates birds who happen to fly over, which include large birds of prey like hawks and eagles. It’s amazing when you realize that a citizen can go to prison for possessing even a single eagle feather, but the “environmentally friendly” Ivanpah plant routinely cooks them mid-flight, leaving them to plummet lifelessly to earth without the least hint of conscience from our environmentalist masters. Obviously this massively expensive exercise is failing, and it should be only a matter of time before someone decides it is time to pull the plug, as has happened to many other of these so-called “clean energy” projects.
