Tag: climate change

Commentary: What to Make of the Biden Climate Barrage

Minnesota Sun Staff

Sleepy no more, President Joe Biden has taken to the Oval Office with gusto. On Wednesday, he resumed a climate policy blitz that has already included rejoining the Paris Agreement and deep-sixing the Keystone XL pipeline with an “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”

Among the banner proclamations from the Wednesday order are that Biden will pause the leasing of federal land to oil and gas companies, seal off 30 percent of federal land from development altogether, create a National Climate Task Force to wage “government-wide” battle on climate change, and require of the intelligence services a National Intelligence Estimate on the security impacts of climate change.

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Biden Administration Considering Allocating COVID-19 Funds to Climate Change Programs

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Biden administration is considering authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to allocate COVID-19 funding for climate change projects, The New York Times reported Monday.

The plan would reallocate part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) overall disaster budget to projects designed to preemptively address damage from climate disasters, The Times reported. The agency wants to build seawalls and elevate or relocate homes in flood planes with the reallocated funds.

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Commentary: The Keystone Cancellation and Biden’s Climate Cronyism

Minnesota Sun Staff

Among many executive actions signed on Inauguration Day to sweep Trump policies out the door along with the man himself, President Biden rescinded approval for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Keystone XL, according to Biden’s top climate policy adviser Gina McCarthy, “was not consistent with addressing the climate crisis to the depth and scope that we are planning to address it.”

Keystone XL has now played the role of political football for a full decade, and Americans can be forgiven for having forgotten the project’s details.

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Commentary: The Social Media Purge Exposes Net Neutrality’s True Goal

Minnesota Sun Staff

For nearly two decades, Silicon Valley made net neutrality its highest policy priority. Under the banner of a “free and open” internet, Google, Facebook, and Twitter sought regulations to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information by treating every bit equally. Or so they said.

Beginning last Friday night, these firms and others executed an unprecedented digital purge of the social media and video accounts of their political rivals. After several years of accelerating suspensions and suppressions, this time YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter permanently banned a number of high-profile conservatives and deplatformed thousands of others, at least temporarily. Many of these accounts had nothing to do with last Wednesday’s heinous events at the Capitol. Yet their histories are erased.

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New House Rules Carve-Out for ‘Climate Change’ Bills Exempted from Requiring Projected Price Tag

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House Democrats blocked a Republican attempt on Monday to require any proposed climate change legislation to also include its projected cost.

Under the Pay As You Go (PAYGO) rule, any additional government spending proposed must be accompanied by tax increases or separate cuts. After a push from several lawmakers in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, however, the rules package for the 117th Congress states PAYGO will not apply to legislation relating to the necessary economic recovery or U.S. efforts to combat climate change.

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Social Justice Favorites Including LGBT+, Climate Change Take a Prominent Role in the New Draft of Social Studies Standards in Minnesota

Minnesota Sun Staff

Minnesota’s newly proposed social studies standards for public schools place significant emphasis on race, gender, climate change and LGBT issues.

Under the first draft of the proposed standards, students will be asked to “develop a respectful awareness about how ideas and norms about gender have changed over time,” accept that “some forms of slavery continued even after emancipation” and learn how the “fight for social justice” continues today.

Students will also be asked to “analyze how resistance movements in the U.S. have organized and responded to oppression,” and “imagine and work toward an equitable and caring future” in keeping with the social justice model.

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U.S. Officially Withdraws from Paris Agreement on Climate Change

Minnesota Sun Staff

The U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

The 2015 agreement was ratified by 189 countries and six more have signed, but have yet to ratify, the AP reported. President Donald Trump sparked criticism and support after announcing the U.S’s withdrawal in 2017, according to another AP report.

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Commentary: The Unelected Tyrants Who Burned Down the Golden State

Minnesota Sun Staff

If this seems like an unfair title, it isn’t, though some of these tyrants were appointed by elected politicians. And all of these tyrants rely on laws that were passed by elected politicians. But while there is plenty of blame to go around, tyranny is what Californians have endured. A tyrannical system is entirely to blame for apocalyptic fires that are wiping out California’s forests, fouling the air, and killing everything in their path.

So who are these unelected tyrants?

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Commentary: Three Inconvenient Truths 60 Minutes Forgot to Mention in Its Story on California Wildfires and Climate Change

Minnesota Sun Staff

CBS journalist Scott Pelley recently visited Butte County, California, to report on the wildfires devastating the Golden State.

Government statistics show that more than 8,300 wildfires have burned some 4 million acres to date. The flames have claimed 31 lives and destroyed nearly 8,700 structures. One of those structures belonged to Fire Station 61 Chief Reed Rankin, who saw his home reduced to a charred skeleton after a September blaze.

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Commentary: Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests

Minnesota Sun Staff

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

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REVIEW: ‘Apocalypse Never’ Takes Direct Aim at ‘Consensus’ of Climate Alarmism

Minnesota Sun Staff

An important new book by Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, attempts to counter the common belief that climate change poses an imminent and existential threat to humanity and the planet. At 285 pages, this is a relatively short and very readable book, but it covers a lot of ground. And with an additional 125 pages containing over 1,000 footnotes, Shellenberger’s arguments are well documented.

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Biden Plans to Spend $2 Trillion on Climate Change if Elected

Minnesota Sun Staff

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced Tuesday a $2 trillion budget to combat climate change reform and create jobs, according to The New York Times.

Biden said during his campaign speech in Delaware the $2 trillion budget will be spent in four years to create jobs while increasing clean energy use in the transportation, electricity and building industries, according to the Times. Biden plans to have an “emissions-free power sector” by 2035.

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Commentary: No, Antarctica Is Not ‘Rapidly Melting’

Minnesota Sun Staff

The BBC, which in September 2018 announced its decision to censor any reports by climate skeptics, continues to propagandize for climate alarmists. On March 12, BBC “Science Correspondent” Jonathan Amos published an alarming article entitled “Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating.” According to Amos, “Earth’s great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions.”

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Climate Activists Want Michael Moore’s Doc Panning Green Energy Banned, Say It’s Chock Full of ‘Misinformation’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Anti-fossil fuel activists unsuccessfully attempted to browbeat the film producer behind a new Michael Moore documentary panning green energy into permanently removing the movie over claims that it contains pro-oil industry misinformation.

Activist Josh Fox, climate scientist Michael Mann, and other environmentalists signed onto a petition Friday asking the  producer to take down Planet of Humans, claiming Moore’s film relies on old data to claim solar and wind energy is dependent on fossil fuels. Films for Action initially nixed the film before putting it back online, saying the move was meant to engage in debate.

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Analysis: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Pitch for the Green New Deal Is Unhinged From Reality

Minnesota Sun Staff

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently gave an impassioned pitch for her “Green New Deal” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. After stating that her opponents were misrepresenting the legislation, she read the full text of it into the Congressional Record and claimed that the reason it is “so, so controversial” is “because for years we have prioritized the pursuit of profit at any and all human and environmental cost.”

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Commentary: The GOP’s Silly ‘Carbon Capture’ Dodge

Minnesota Sun Staff

House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-23) is releasing a climate bill this week. The purpose is “to put the GOP on the map on climate” in response to polls reporting that enough young voters have finally succumbed to a lifetime of being propagandized on climate.

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Conservative Research Fellow Challenges Walz to Consider ‘Dissenting’ Voices on Climate Change

Anthony Gockowski

A conservative policy fellow with the Center of the American Experiment applied for Gov. Tim Walz’s “Advisory Council on Climate Change,” which promised to “represent different perspectives and experiences.”

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Greta Thunberg’s Dad Worries About ‘All the Hate’ Aimed at Her

Minnesota Sun Staff

Speaking to a BBC Radio Programme, of which his daughter Greta is guest-editor today, Svante Thunberg said the 16-year-old had become “very happy” as a result of her climate activist work despite facing regular abuse from people who “don’t want to change” their lifestyles and he worries about all the “hate” she faces. Ironically the BBC flew presenter Mishal Husain to Stockholm to interview the teenager and her dad, New York Post reports.

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Minneapolis City Council: Failure to Act on Climate Change ‘Antithetical’ to the Declaration of Independence

Anthony Gockowski

A Minneapolis City Council committee passed a resolution Monday to declare that “there is a climate emergency which demands a massive-scale mobilization to halt, reverse, and address its consequences.”

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Commentary: Rotary Takes a Hard Left Turn on Climate Change

Minnesota Sun Staff

When I joined Rotary in 2014, one of the most important guides I was given by the members is that Rotary is not political. Although I’ve been involved in local politics for many years, I really have enjoyed putting politics aside and working with other Rotarians of all stripes to help those less fortunate locally and internationally.

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Commentary: An Unexpected Climate Hero is Equity Markets

Minnesota Sun Staff

Joesph Stalin allegedly said that the “death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.” Fitting neatly with his horrendous ideology, our brains are simply not equipped to understand suffering of astonishing proportions – for a single person suffering we feel empathy; with millions we blink cluelessly before looking away, dumbfounded.

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Commentary: The Politics, Science, and Politicized Science of Climate Change

Minnesota Sun Staff

One has to wonder if the shock and despair described in David Bowie’s 1971 hit, “Five Years,” would be the preferred collective mentality for humanity, at least if the relentless propaganda campaigns of climate change activists are successful. And one must admit they have powerful allies at their disposal. A climate alarm consensus informs America’s entire educational, entertainment, and media establishments, along with most corporate marketing, and most political platforms from the local city council to the United Nations.

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Dean Phillips Cosponsors ‘100 Percent Clean Economy Act,’ Says ‘Humankind’s Ability to Thrive’ in Question

Anthony Gockowski

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN-03) touted his status as an “original cosponsor” of a bill that would force America on the path to a 100 percent clean energy economy by 2050.

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Analysis: Climate Change Fears of Teen Activist Are Empirically Baseless

Minnesota Sun Staff

At a recent United Nations summit, 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg claimed that the Earth is on the brink of destruction and that older generations are betraying younger ones by not doing enough to stop climate change. The media has amplified these allegations by giving her speech broad, glowing coverage, but the fears she expressed are not grounded in reality.

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Minneapolis and St. Paul School Districts Allowed Students to Skip Class for Climate Strike

Anthony Gockowski

The Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts reportedly alerted parents that their children would not be disciplined for participating in Friday’s global youth climate strike.

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Commentary: Everything You’ve Heard About the Amazon Fires Is Wrong

Minnesota Sun Staff

The international news coverage of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fires has been a complete disaster. News outlets published inaccurate yet easily verifiable “facts” about the number of fires, declaring the situation “record-breaking” and “unprecedented.” Social media lit up with misleading claims about the loss of planetary oxygen supply (20 percent, said French President Emmanuel Macron) threatening to asphyxiate us all. Stock photos and images of forest fires from the last two decades including Peru and Bolivia were shared widely and wildly. Celebrities and politicians alike heaped condemnation upon Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro leading to an ongoing geopolitical crisis.

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A Deep Dive into the ‘Density Delusion’

Minnesota Sun Staff

For decades, American workers have watched as their ability to enjoy middle-class lifestyles erodes away. Conventional explanations abound. American industry in the immediate aftermath of World War II was uniquely unscathed, and with a near-monopoly on global manufacturing, it was able to pass much of the ample profits on to workers. It wasn’t until the 1970s that American manufacturers confronted serious foreign competition, and ever since, the competition has only become more intense.

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Keith Ellison Sued for Allegedly Illegal ‘Embedding’ of Bloomberg-Linked Lawyers in Attorney General’s Office

Anthony Gockowski

Attorney General Keith Ellison is being sued for declining to hand over documents related to his office’s hiring of a lawyer connected to Michael Bloomberg’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.

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Climate Experts Admit to Republican Congressman That Humans Aren’t Responsible for Past 20,000 Years of Global Warming

Anthony Gockowski

  During a Thursday hearing before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL-05) got a panel of climate science experts to admit that “humans are not responsible for the Earth’s global warming that has occurred over the past 20,000 years.” All four of the experts…

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House Democrats Spread ‘Lies’ About Climate Change And Hurricanes, Scientist Says

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Michael Bastach   House Democrats’ climate change hearing is based on “inaccurate” information that’s “not in accord with current science or consensus,” according to a scientist. A Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee will hold a hearing Tuesday on natural disaster policy “in the wake of climate change.” However, Democrats…

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Climate Change, Open Borders Top Priorities in Klobuchar’s Plan for First 100 Days

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Kyle Hooten   Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar’s campaign posted an agenda to Medium Tuesday for her first 100 days in office, should she win the 2020 presidential election. Several measures to relax immigration law rank among her top priorities. The Minnesota Senator stated she would also rejoin the…

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Commentary: Biden’s Climate Plan Requires a Savvy Response

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Edward Ring   Front running 2020 presidential contender Joe Biden has just released his climate “plan,”claiming that with a $1.7 trillion federal investment, U.S. carbon emissions will reach zero within 30 years. You can say this for Biden – the canny old campaigner isn’t highlighting his climate plan as a cure-all…

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