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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Associated Press Takes More Money to Promote Climate Alarm
- Podcast of the Week: Biden Wants to Ban Your Favorite Appliances (Guest: Ben Lieberman)
- Asheville, North Carolina Has an EV Bus Problem
- Dispatchable Power, Mainly Fossil Fuels, Serves as Texas Grid Backbone During Freeze
- Climate Comedy
- Video of the Week: Climate Trial of the Century: Mann vs Steyn
- Recommended Sites
Miss Anything at Heartland’s Climate Conference? No Problem.
Associated Press Takes More Money to Promote Climate Alarm
The Associated Press (AP) recently accepted a grant of approximately $300,000 from the KR Foundation, a Danish organization founded to “address the climate crisis by pushing for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.”
This follows a $8 million grant to the AP by five U.S.-based foundations—the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—in February 2022. Those foundation devote significant funds to motivating carbon restricting policies at the federal, state, and local levels of government. That grant directed the AP to hire more than two dozen journalists to report on climate issues, primarily from Africa, Brazil, India, and the United States.
Now, the Danish group is giving the AP additional money to continue and expand its efforts to stoke climate alarm through its “global scholars network.”
The New American is skeptical of the AP’s claim “that it maintains strict editorial independence,” for its climate content, despite the significant infusion of funds dedicated specifically to expanding the agency’s climate reporting.
“A quick check of its recent headlines on the subject of climate change might give a skeptic pause to wonder at the truth of that claim,” writes The New American. “For instance, recent headlines include ‘Climate change threatens Bolivian “cholitas” livelihood’ on November 30; ‘Climate change hits women’s health harder. Activists want leaders to address it at COP28,’ on November 20; and ‘Endangered species list grows by 2,000. Climate change is part of the problem,’ on December 11.”
It could, of course, be purely a coincidence that the AP increased its slanted, alarmingly headlined and written climate coverage in the countries specified by the grants, but one suspects it isn’t since, at the time of the initial grant in 2022, Julie Pace, a senior AP vice president, said “This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story.”
“AP stories with anything positive to say about climate skepticism are scarce, if any exist at all, which makes one wonder if the New York Post editorial board was right in February of last year when it opined on the AP’s climate coverage: ‘Sorry: This is news-as-prostitution. Pay the media to get the coverage you want,’” continued The New American.
At the time the AP accepted its initial climate reporting grant, I noted that I thought it was just making public and official what I had long maintained was the AP’s operational practice: passing off press releases and blog posts from climate change activists and groups and those who fund them as if they were actual news stories.
The reporting I’ve seen from the AP since then only confirms this view. Since the AP received its first grant directing it to cover global climate change more extensively, as detailed at Climate Realism, the AP has published dozens of stories that were patently false—long on assertions and opinions, but short on facts—from misleading claims about climate change causing a decline in endangered birds, to provably false claims that climate change is creating refugees, to sparking fears of climate change-caused extended allergy seasons while ignoring the larger benefits of longer growing seasons.
The KR Foundation’s work has been especially focused on pressuring banks and investors to cease funding fossil-fuel projects, preventing fossil fuel companies or those who believe fossil fuels provide benefits from presenting their views, and supporting politicians and efforts to move to what it calls “the transition to a sustainable economic paradigm,” which, of necessity, requires the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.”
Be on the lookout for AP stories in the coming months focusing on these topics. I, for one, will be surprised if we don’t see an uptick of stories on these topics.
The AP’s coverage since its first climate grants—eschewing climate realists’ viewpoints, using “expert statements” or anecdotal claims in lieu of hard data when it comes to climate reporting, and its acceptance of the KR Foundation’s money—only cements my view that, on the topic of climate change, the AP has very publicly ceased to be a legitimate news gathering and reporting organization. It has become instead a bought and paid-for shill for the extreme environmental movement, spreading climate alarm around the world.
Upton Sinclair reportedly once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Similarly, William Jennings Bryant reportedly said, “It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest.”
Sources: Climate Change Weekly; The New American
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Podcast of the Week
In its obsessive pursuit of carbon dioxide emission reductions without regard to costs or freedom of choice, the Biden administration has conducted a regulatory assault on appliances, limiting consumers choice of appliances in a doomed attempt to control future weather. CEI Senior Fellow Ben Lieberman discusses how the energy efficiency mandates that the Biden administration is applying to a larger than ever range of appliances and products are limiting consumers freedom of choice, increasing costs, and forcing the sale of products that don’t have features that consumers want and that don’t work as well and the products they are replacing.
Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
Read the brutal truth about how battery production for electric vehicles cause immense environmental destruction and human tragedy.
Asheville, North Carolina Has an EV Bus Problem
Asheville, North Carolina bought five electric buses in 2018 at a cost of more than $616,796. The Gateway Pundit reports that three of those five buses are now sitting idle, with one being offline for months for a broken door they are unable to get repaired.
“We haven’t been able to get new doors,” Asheville’s interim transportation director Jessica Morriss told abc13 News. “There’s no third party that makes a door. We’d have to get custom-made doors.”
It is doubtful it would take more than a week or two to get a door replaced on a normal diesel bus, getting the bus back on its route. But it is not just faulty or no service that is now causing Asheville’s transportation director to bemoan the decision to purchase electric buses. The initial cost of the buses is dwarfed by the maintenance, service, and ancillary costs unique to electric buses, as Gateway Pundit notes:
Morriss reveals a staggering total cost per bus nearing $1 million, including infrastructure for chargers and annual costs like leasing batteries and electric charges. And then there’s maintenance—another $251,000 spent on items like replacing traction drive controls for all buses. Maintenance director John McDaniel adds to the tale of woe, noting the replacement of power inverters at $14,000 each.
“The last couple of years have been particularly difficult,” Morriss laments, noting the bus manufacturer, Proterra, has filed for bankruptcy, making parts for repairs as elusive as a quiet day in their department. “We don’t see an end in sight,” she adds.
Worse still, even the fully operational buses often don’t make it through a full shift, especially in the winter when the transportation department often has to pull them offline for hours to charge, after as few as three round trips to the airport. In addition, in the cold the buses drain part of their charge just to warm up for operations.
Few may be surprised that Norway’s and Sweden’s green virtue-signaling electric bus experiments are proving to be busts, after all the winters in those Nordic countries are typically long and extreme. But Asheville has a relatively moderate climate. If electric buses don’t provide reliable, cost-effective service in temperate regions, the question rises, do they make sense anywhere.
This is especially true when one realizes that the very reason for their existence is to reduce public transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. But, as Gateway pundit and other articles on similar situations elsewhere have remarked:
The ripple effects are felt across the city’s entire fleet, as biodiesel and hybrid buses pick up the slack, being run more frequently due to the electric buses’ frequent downtimes.
“There’s some lessons here for sure,” Morriss concedes, revealing a pause in further electric investments until they can ensure reliability.
Replacing reliable diesel or natural gas-powered buses with electric buses is foolish. Having idle rolling stock sitting around to fill-in for electric buses when they are not functioning is expensive, and using them as replacements for EVs in those situations defeats the purpose of buying EVs in the first place. No emissions are saved, but high, unnecessary costs are incurred.
Source: The Gateway Pundit