From the DAILY CALLER

Nick Pope
Contributor

Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta struggled to defend his own lawsuit against ExxonMobil during a Tuesday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Bonta’s office filed suit against ExxonMobil on Monday, alleging that the corporation deceived the public about the efficacy of recycling plastics and specifically its “advanced recycling” program, which essentially breaks down old plastics into their molecular component parts that are then used to produce other products. During the interview, Bonta struggled to defend the merits of his lawsuit and was also called out by one of the program’s hosts for being hypocritical about jet fuel given that he seems to have flown into New York City for this week’s “Climate Week NYC” summit. (RELATED: Officials Told Biden’s EPA That Its Aggressive Green Power Plant Scheme Has Serious Flaws, Docs Show)

WATCH:

“They’re lying in different ways. They are saying that essentially, 100% of U.S. plastic could be recycled, and that was the myth they wanted to perpetuate,” Bonta said in response to questions from CNBC’s anchors.

After some more back and forth, Bonta continued to try to explain his lawsuit against ExxonMobil.

“Of all the plastics that ExxonMobil produces, from their product, only 1% goes into the advanced recycling process at all, and of that one percent, 92% becomes mostly transportation fuel,” Bonta said. “So the other 99% of what ExxonMobil produces in plastic and what the world produces in plastic, advanced recycling doesn’t touch.”

“But advanced recycling sounds like a better thing than nothing, than going into a landfill,” CNBC host Becky Quick interjected.

“They don’t get any credit for advanced recycling, turning things into jet fuel that’s emitted into the air or transportation fuel that becomes part of our …” Bonta fired back.

“So your point is we shouldn’t have jet fuel?” Quick said in response.

“My point is ExxonMobil shouldn’t lie. And they shouldn’t point to another lie —” Bonta said, before CNBC anchor Joe Kernen cut him off to point out the irony of Bonta railing against jet fuel after flying to New York City to partake in a climate summit attended by numerous business and political elites.

“You flew here though, right?” Kernen asked.

“We travel,” Bonta replied.

If Bonta flew roundtrip from Sacramento to New York City to appear at Climate Week, he would have flown approximately 5,000 miles and emitted about 2.26 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to calculations done on Sustainable Travel.

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From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Marc Morano

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CNN: Why was Hurricane Helene so bad? Fossil fuel pollution. – Excerpt: “For decades now, scientists have been warning us that extreme weather events will be exacerbated by this blanket of carbon pollution we’ve been wrapping around our planet,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “But as a human, it is shocking to see the devastation occurring in front of our eyes, affecting the people and places we know and love.”

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CNN: “It’s not rocket science”: Prof. Michael Mann explains why hurricanes are getting stronger –

From CNN’s Elise Hammond

The world is getting hotter and hurricanes are getting stronger, according to climate scientists.

Hurricane Helene hit the Florida as a Category 4 storm on Thursday night, destroying homes, knocking out power and bringing deadly flash flooding.

“It’s not it’s not rocket science, it’s pretty basic physics that tells us that the warmer you make the oceans, the more moisture they evaporate into the atmosphere, the more energy there is to intensify these storms,” Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN on Friday.

Stronger storms means stronger winds, which leads to more life-threatening storm surge and catastrophic flooding. After it makes landfall, the storm is still dangerous, thanks to that increased amount of moisture that allows it to continue to dump rain, Mann said.

…

But, Mann said there are things we can do to prevent it from getting worse, including stopping carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy “as rapidly as possible.”

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Meteorologist Joe Bastardi fact checks Mann’s claims to CNN:

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman 

“The Wildlife Service failed to rely on the best scientific and commercial data available when making its designation as required by law and therefore made inaccurate and arbitrary assumptions about the current and future status of the species.”

If Legal Insurrection were ever to have a mascot, it might have to be the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard.

Thanks to long-time reader Danelle, we have been following the creature’s endangered species status since 2011, when the Obama administration was poised to place it under protected status. It appeared to be part of a larger Obama administration effort to choke the nation’s oil production capabilities one permit at a time, as the lizard likes to make its home in lands rich in fossil fuels.

For over a year, that threat was hanging over the heads of the Texas petroleum industry before (in a rare display of sanity and reason) the US Fish and Wildlife Service denied the request.

This July, the Biden administration resurrected the request for such a listing and targeted the important oil-producing region of the Permian Basin with this action.

Now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has just announced that his office is suing the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Biden administration officials for the declaration.

In his lawsuit, Paxton cited the successful voluntary efforts that have gone into successfully protecting this species in the region.

…Paxton said the defendants unlawfully classified the lizard as endangered in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

“The Wildlife Service failed to rely on the best scientific and commercial data available when making its designation as required by law and therefore made inaccurate and arbitrary assumptions about the current and future status of the species,” Paxton said in a statement.

“Further, the regulation classifying the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered did not take into consideration the ongoing voluntary conservation efforts already in place at a local and state level. Because of this, the federal government’s action would unduly undermine vital economic development in the Permian Basin, subjecting Texas industries and private landowners to regulatory uncertainty and ambiguity about what they can do with their own land,” Paxton said.

Paxton had notified the Biden Administration in late July the listing violated the Endangered Species Act and he would sue if it was not reversed. The lawsuit asks the court to find the agencies acted arbitrarily and capriciously in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and the ESA.

Paxton also accused the Fish and Wildlife Service of intentionally being vague about the areas to be protected in this economically critical region.

The dunes sagebrush lizard, measuring just 2.5 inches long, inhabits roughly 4 percent of the 86,000-square-mile Permian Basin, which stretches across Texas and New Mexico, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. In Texas, the species has been identified in Andrews, Crane, Gaines, Ward, and Winkler counties.

The endangered listing mandates that oil and gas companies avoid areas where the dunes sagebrush lizard resides, but the Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet identified those specific regions as it continues to gather data. Depending on the severity of the violation, companies that violate this rule could face fines of up to $50,000 and potential prison time.

Paxton’s office criticized the Fish and Wildlife Service for not identifying the areas where the lizard resides, leaving operators and landowners in limbo about how they can use their land.

Any real science the bureaucrats in the Biden administration might use is purely coincidental.

Frankly, I hypothesize that the dunes sagebrush lizard is about as in danger of going extinct as a species as our planet is from “global warming” due to man-made carbon dioxide from fossil fuel production.