From the NoTricksZone

Welcome to Germany’s green economic miracle. The year is 2025!

Germany’s so-called Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) has had one unmistakable result: Germany now finds itself rapidly nearing the brink of a third world country where the power supply is no longer reliable and brownouts becoming more and more a daily routine.

What’s happening is the opposite of what was once promised by the know-it-all climate wisemen: “Green energies would lead to a clean and prosperous country that would be the envy of the world.

So much for their fantasies.

The reality, as reported yesterday by Germany’s leading daily, Bild here: Germans in south Germany are now being told that their laundry and e-car charging  are to be done only at certain times!

According to online Bild yesterday: “People in Baden-Württemberg should use as little electricity as possible on Friday from 8 am to 11 am. The transmission capacities of the power lines from the north of Germany to the southwest were over-utilized,”

Consumers were asked to avoid the use of all energy-intensive appliances.

Grid operator TransnetBW issues energy supply red alert yesterday

Recall that Germany’s green energy masterminds decided that it would be best to decommission the country’s fleet on nuclear power plants, and to produce weather-dependent power with wind farms operating in the north of country, and then supply it to southern Germany via power transmission lines. There’s on problem with the masterplan from the green masterminds: the wind doesn’t blow all the time and so shortages result and rationing becomes necessary!

According to the StromgGedacht from grid operator TransnetBW in Stuttgart, to avoid overloading the grid: “Electric vehicles or batteries (of laptops etc.) should also not be charged from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. if this can be avoided.”

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Under the guise of climate remediation, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a bill into law Dec. 27 that will allow the state to fine oil and natural gas companies a total of $75 billion over the next 25 years for their alleged role in inflicting climate-related damage on the state’s infrastructure.

“With nearly every record rainfall, heatwave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters who have historically harmed our environment,” Hochul said in a statement.

“This landmark legislation shifts the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil-fuel companies most responsible for the pollution,” Hochul added.

New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act is modeled after the “polluter pays” principle contained in the original 1980 Superfund law, which said parties held responsible for contributing to toxic pollution sites would be liable for cleanup. But treating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the production and combustion of fossil fuels the same way as contamination from, say, a long-abandoned mine is comparing apples with oranges.

CO2 – whether manmade or natural – is not a pollutant; indeed, today’s rising atmospheric levels of CO2 are highly beneficial to life, both fauna and flora. One of the surest ways to lower agricultural productivity is to adopt climate policies that reduce atmospheric CO2. Furthermore, attributing weather events such as heavy rain, droughts, heatwaves, cold snaps, and coastal storms to use of fossil fuels is purely speculative. Nowhere in the New York statute is a cause-and-effect relationship established.

Hochul and her fellow Democrats in Albany are not interested in such matters; their agenda is extortion. Instead of paying to upgrade the state’s roads and bridges – not to mention New York City’s crumbling subway system – with higher taxes on already overtaxed New Yorkers, shaking down oil and gas companies looks like an easy way out. Under the new law, companies that emitted over 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2018 will be held to account. How much each company will have to cough up will be determined by state bureaucrats. As many as three dozen or more, led by ExxonMobil and Chevron, will have to pay up.

Vermont passed its own version of the climate Superfund law last summer, and similar legislation is under consideration in California, Massachusetts, and Maryland. Using state and local tort laws to replenish depleted government coffers in the name of remediating damage said to result from climate change may be a bridge too far legally. The effort suffered a setback in 2021, when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a New York City lawsuit targeting fossil fuel producers. As recently noted by the Wall Street Journal, the court held that state tort law could not be used “to hold multinational oil companies liable for the damages caused by global greenhouse gas emissions.”

Further clarity on applying state tort law to global greenhouse gas emissions may have to come from the U.S. Supreme Court. The court is considering whether to hear Sunoco LP v. City and County of Honolulu. Sunoco, an oil company, was sued by the City and County of Honolulu for its alleged impact on the climate. In a petition filed in May 2024 with the Supreme Court, attorneys for the company argued that the case against Sunoco was unconstitutional.

“The Hawaii Supreme Court held that the state law can impose liability for injuries allegedly caused by the effect of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate,” the brief reads. “The Second Circuit, considering materially identical claims, rejected such a breathtaking, extraterritorial application of state law. Other courts, too, have declined to apply state law extraterritorially to regulate transboundary pollution. The question is whether the unique phenomenon of global climate change licenses states to ignore the structure of our constitutional system and extend state law beyond their borders is at the heart of the climate-change litigation currently ongoing nationwide. The Court’s intervention is urgently needed.”

A decision from the Supreme Court on whether to hear the case is expected in early 2025. In the meantime, blue states – anticipating that the incoming Trump administration will roll back a slew of federal green energy policies – will attempt to build a firewall to preserve as much of their climate agenda as the courts allow.

This article originally appeared in Human Events

Essay by Eric Worrall

Author and Teacher Oliver Gough is a PhD candidate and playwright researching climate change theatre at the University of Queensland, where he also teaches.

The only way out is through: Embracing the existential weirdness of the era of climate change

Oliver Gough

…

Learning to die?

Roy Scranton is another writer who advocates for a deep and scary thought experiment to move past terminal inaction and sluggishness on climate change. He boldly suggests: “If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.” The practice of coming to terms with an extinction of human beings and the existence of a planet without us can lead to a humbling, realistic and truly ecological way of thinking.

This extension of Morton’s “dark ecology” further does away with assumptions of human triumph over the elements, and accepts that: “Carbon-fuelled capitalism and its techno-utopian ideologues have promised infinite growth and infinite innovation, yet they have proven incapable of saving us from the disaster they have made.”

The answer? Imagining and learning the practice of death, preparing for it as you would a terminal diagnosis. This isn’t to lay down and welcome it, but to gain perspective and expand the range of responses. Economics and mathematics can’t quite imagine or express this experiment. Something like climate change, or the death of a species, is felt on levels beyond that realm.

…

Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill-suited to address … But the conceptual and existential problems that the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the heart of humanistic inquiry: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? What is truth? What is good? In the world of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — What does my life mean in the face of death? — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination.

…

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/dark-ecology-existential-weirdness-of-climate-change-era/104781622

Will students be cheered and encouraged if they decide to die early to avoid the rush?

I guess the takeaway is, if you want your kids to learn theatre and performance arts without also learning we all need to prepare for imminent death, probably best to choose somewhere other than the University of Queensland.

There is zero chance anthropogenic climate change in the foreseeable future will make the world uninhabitable for humans. The proof is that our monkey ancestors thrived in a much hotter world. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the cold returned.

If a bunch of monkeys with brains the size of matchboxes could figure out how to survive in a much warmer world, I’m certain we could figure it out.

Oliver Gough is not alone in believing the world is about to end. A disturbing percentage of Aussie school kids believe they won’t survive to adulthood, because of climate change.

Oliver is free to embrace his whacky beliefs, but I am profoundly disturbed someone who holds such extreme views is a teacher at a major university. I am also concerned that my tax dollars are helping to give this guy a platform to express those extreme views to a larger audience, via a government funded news outlet.

Perhaps administrators or parents should take a closer look at exactly what children entrusted to the care of University of Queensland are being taught.