The head of the criminal division of the US Attorney's office in DC has resigned rather than investigate a Biden-sponsored New Green Deal grant network for possible criminal behavior. Denise Cheung announced her departure to staff with an email saying, “This office is a special place. I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.” //

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was to funnel about $26 billion to the United Climate Fund and Climate Justice Alliance. This grant was funded in August 2024 to the tune of $20.3 billion, again in October for $4.3 billion, with the final tranche of $2 billion landing in December 2024/January 2025; see the details here. These were all part of the Biden "throwing gold bars off the Titanic" (see EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds the $20 Billion 'Gold Bars' the Biden Administration Tried to Jettison – RedState) plan where immense amounts of grant funding would be "parked" in leftist 501(c)3 corporations that were supposed to continue to run beneath the radar even after Trump had taken office.

The Biden-Harris administration paid POLITICO for subscriptions, and the outlet performed their propaganda PR work well, proudly announcing this $20 billion Biden-Harris EPA partnership in April 2024.

The Biden administration announced recipients of the climate law’s biggest grant program Thursday, kicking off a $20 billion effort to transform community lending and green the U.S. economy.

EPA will award eight initial grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, ranging in size from $400 million to almost $7 billion. The largest award will go to Climate United, a partnership that includes a nonprofit impact investment firm and two affordable housing lenders.

Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health Concentrations (IDLH)
CAS number: 124–38–9

NIOSH REL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA,

30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL

Current OSHA PEL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA

1989 OSHA PEL: 10,000 ppm (18,000 mg/m3) TWA,

30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL

Basis for original (SCP) IDLH: The chosen IDLH is based on the statements by ACGIH [1971] that a 30-minute exposure at 50,000 ppm produces signs of intoxication, and a few minutes of exposure at 70,000 ppm and 100,000 ppm produces unconsciousness [Flury and Zernik 1931]. AIHA [1971] reported that 100,000 ppm is the atmospheric concentration immediately dangerous to life. In addition, Hunter [1975] noted that exposure to 100,000 ppm for only a few minutes can cause loss of consciousness.

OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
NIOSH REL
Up to 10-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
ACGIH TLV©
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
CAL/OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
PEL-TWA
5000 ppm (9000 mg/m³)

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.” //

The paper claims that companies will be able to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for as little as $94. The cost of averting less than one degree of warming by 2100, according to some, would have cost around $2 trillion every year for a century — which doesn’t include the economic toll it would extract from the world’s economy. //

For many environmentalists, all this will be welcome news. I doubt it will be for the politically motivated climate warriors, whose aim has always been social engineering in the cause of curbing capitalistic excesses. Even if decarbonization is successful, they will demand we continue to mandate inefficient renewable energies. They will demand tax dollars be used to prop up the clean-energy industry. They will continue to demand we ban fracking. They will continue to propose creating fabricated markets that artificially spike the cost of fossil fuels to pay for supposed negative externalities.

But, as a political matter, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to sell those policies when they can no longer claim the apocalypse is nigh.

The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000", Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, "to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run".

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.

The more President Donald Trump does, the more the left flies into stammering, impotent rage, and the more the rest of us have to point and laugh at. And the president is doing a lot, including removing us from impractical and even wasteful international deals that hurt American prosperity - like the Paris climate accords, which the president yanked us out of right away.

That made the climate scolds angry, of course. But now it's getting even better; as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is finding more and more wasteful expenditures, the more all the president's men are cutting out of the executive branch's budgets - and a lot of those cuts are emptying the coffers of some notorious climate scolds.

That's right, the federal government was paying these people to advocate for the destruction of our modern, high-technology lifestyles. At the great climate website Watts Up With That, author Charles Rotter has brought receipts.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/05/schadenfreude-at-its-finest-climate-grifters-cry-over-trumps-grant-freeze/

Mr. Eschenbach writes:

Encouraged by the reception of my previous post “Eight Ten-Thousandths Of A Degree Per Gigaton“, which ranged from warm acceptance through amused contempt to outright hostility, I’ve expanded my research to analyze the CO2 emissions of the late great State of California.

In my post linked above, I found that IF the IPCC is correct (which is a big “IF”), for each gigaton (Gt) of avoided CO2 emissions, there is an avoided global warming of 0.0008°C. Please read that post for the detailed calculations. //

That’s a total of about $1.5 TRILLION dollars, and it doesn’t count the cost of other California CO2-related laws and regulations. The increase in electricity demand from electric houses and electric cars alone will be another huge cost. A trillion and a half hard-earned taxpayer dollars … and all of that to MAYBE reduce the temperature in 2045 by six-thousandths of one degree C.

Seriously. 0.006°C.

Meaningless. Unmeasurably small. Lost in the noise. And please, don’t say that if only everyone did it, everything would be wonderful. At a cost of $1.5 terabucks for a reduction of 0.006°C, it would cost us OVER $250 TRILLION DOLLARS to perhaps maybe possibly reduce the 2045 temperature by one degree … madness.

The 2009 endangerment finding has functioned as a regulatory sledgehammer. Once greenhouse gases were deemed pollutants under the Clean Air Act, the EPA gained sweeping powers to regulate industries across the board. The consequences were dire: entire coal towns were hollowed out, energy costs soared, and American manufacturers faced stiff competition from overseas producers who were not burdened by similar regulations.

That last part is the key. We should note the two largest emitters of carbon in the world right now are China and India, and neither country cares much about what American and European climate scolds think — nor do they care about American EPA pronouncements. And there's no reason why they should. While the American left shouts in outrage at the very idea of American leaders putting American interests first, they are strangely silent when China and India put Chinese and Indian interests first. //

anon-d2ue
3 hours ago
In the 1970s, one could say the EPA was the model of a successful government agency, it made a large, measurable, and noticable impact in improving the quality of air and water. By the mid-1980s, it really should have been “Mission Accomplished” with the EPA budget winding down to maintenance of what had been achieved and some funding to research and regulate emerging risks from new chemicals, toxins, etc. Instead, the Agency just kept growing, growing, and growing with marginal, if any, benefit to improving the environment or human health, but at tremendous cost to the economy and federal budget.

I don't think Americans are making this connection. And the way we can see this in - right here and now, take a look at the monthly change in Google searches. Look at the searches for wildfire, up 2,400 percent. My goodness gracious. This is the most amount of people searching for wildfires ever. Ever. Going back since Google [trends began back in 2004].

But look at climate change. Look at the change. It doesn't go hand in hand with wildfires. It's actually down. It's down 9 percent. And I also looked in California. There has been no increase in the number of searches for climate change. //

anon-ha5c
3 minutes ago
The “extreme” weather events of the past few decades are nothing compared to those of the 19th Century, why don’t we ever have a comparison between then and now.

The scare story caravan has moved on to pastures new these days, not unrelated to the fact that at the end of 2024 the extent of sea ice in Antarctica was roughly the same as the 1981 to 2010 average. According to the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), “this provides a sharp illustration of the high variability of Antarctica sea ice extent”. It does indeed, and it also provides us with a classic case study of how a short-term natural variation, well understood by many scientists, is weaponised by activists in science, politics and journalism to induce mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting the political Net Zero lunacy. //

All of the confusion – designed to constantly promote Net Zero – arises because narrative-driven commentators assign most weather and climate changes to humans adding trace amounts of a trace gas into the atmosphere. It leaves little room for explaining the role of natural variation in the changing climate. Antarctica has not warmed for at least 70 years and a recent paper found that the summer temperature had shown a dramatic 1°C fall from 1977-1999, followed by a pause since the turn of the century. Another paper found that Antarctica sea ice extent had slowly increased since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979. //

Measuring temperatures and ice levels over the tiny span of modern human measurements is not. The proponents of this are not engaged in serious research; they are working backward from a conclusion in pursuit of an agenda. //

Cherry-picking of data, careful tweaking of information, the control of the flow of information: Not science. Not open inquiry. Not a scrupulous examination of facts, of data. This is activism and fear-mongering. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends. //

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden's inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration's EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they'd have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

Blaming these fires on "climate change" when there's little to no fire mitigation (clearing brush, trimming undergrowth, managing forests) and allowing millions of acre-feet of water to be washed out to sea are also really dumb ideas. Maybe these dumb ideas are what they mean by "man-made" climate change.

It's hard to ignore the record.

Fire officials say that homeless camp wildfires doubled from 2020 to 2023 to 13,909. There were 24 "homeless related" fires in LA County responded to every day of 2021.

According to NBC 4 in L.A., some of the homeless campfires started from campers illegally hooking up to underground electricity outlets. That's what caused a fire in Hollywood. //

In October 2024, Joe Biden's Administration officially pronounced an end to controlled burns in California for fire mitigation. //

In the Sacramento area, where a homeless camp sparked a 585-acre wildfire in June 2024, local officials were asked to provide homeless campers with firefighting equipment instead of telling the campers to get out. //

FloridaMan
15 hours ago
somebody's battery operated vehicle (there's no such thing as an electric vehicle) exploded... started the whole shebang...?

A recent post at the BBC, titled “Seven proven ways to help the planet in 2025,” claims that the planet is threatened by global climate change due to human activity, and lists seven changes people can make in their lives save the planet by curbing emissions. The suggestions include: giving up meat; stopping flying; buying fewer clothes; reducing the carbon footprint of keeping a pet, if you keep one at all; using alternative home heating technologies; supporting fossil fuel divestment; and reducing plastic use. While none of these suggestions are novel, they are also not going to accomplish what the BBC claims, both because human activity is not threatening the planet via carbon dioxide emissions, and because many of these suggestions actually do not reduce emissions or are targeting areas that won’t have any measurable impact even if emissions reductions were desirable. //

The BBC makes no effort to deal with the fact that every one of these suggestions is bad for our modern lifestyles; they are hazardous to our health, our comfort, and our longevity. //

After all, the elites know what’s best, the hoi polloi must sacrifice to save the planet.

The World Bank’s mission has been subverted by green ideologues who assert that a low-carbon world benefits the world’s poor but fail to acknowledge that making energy much more costly increases poverty. The World Bank tags itself as ‘working for a world free of poverty’ … In making its choice between development and sustainability, the World Bank has decided it is going to try and ‘save the planet’ on the backs of the poor.

By abdicating its founding principles for alleviating global poverty, the World Bank has taken a lead role among multilateral financial institutions in denying vast financial resources to poorer countries. It has hypocritically vetoed the right of developing countries to adopt the path of economic growth and environmental improvement that the now-rich countries had taken up successfully since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. The World Bank’s obsessive support for intermittent, low-yield renewable energy such as solar and wind power comes at the cost of its central charter to help the poor, an outcome that can only be described as egregiously unjust.

In 2019, during Trump's first term, a federal judge ruled that OCSLA does not permit presidents to overturn bans established by previous administrations. This means Trump would need congressional approval to reverse Biden's decision. //

Here's the part that really makes Joe Biden look petty and vindictive, not that he didn't look that way already. The outgoing president cited concerns about climate change as a reason for signing the order. If that really was his concern — if he really wanted to shut down energy production on essentially the entire United States continental shelf because of climate change — why did he wait until two weeks before leaving office?

The answer is obvious: This order has nothing to do with the climate. It's all political backbiting and attempted sabotage, pure and simple.

In October, Biden insisted that “nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore because of Hurricane Helene.”

“Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger,” he said. “Today, in North Carolina, I saw the impacts of that fury: massive trees uprooted; homes literally swept off their foundations, swept down rivers; you know, families that are heartbroken.”

Yet is Hurricane Helene really proof that man-made climate change is making life more dangerous in the U.S.?

The Heritage Foundation special report “Keeping an Eye on the Storms: An Analysis of Trends in Hurricanes Over Time” answers definitively in the negative.

In the report, Joe D’Aleo, visiting fellow in Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, and Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, break down the data. //

Although hurricanes may not have worsened with climate change, alarmists often claim that tropical cyclones are more destructive now than previously.

Twenty of the 30 most destructive hurricanes since 1900 have hit the mainland U.S. after 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Besides Hurricane Katrina, which carried out a devastating $200 billion in damage in 2005, all of the top four made landfall in the last decade. //

Yet this data does not reflect the worsening of hurricanes so much as the population growth and economic growth of the U.S. in coastal areas, D’Aleo and Dayaratna conclude.

For instance, only 1.3 million residents called Miami-Dade County, Florida, home in 1971, living in 473,200 housing units. By 2022, the population had grown to more than 2.6 million, and the housing units had more than doubled, to 1.1 million, according to the Census Bureau.

In 2018, a paper in the journal “Nature Sustainability” put the hurricane damage from previous years into better context by adjusting for increases in wealth, population, and inflation. This graph shows no meaningful trend in hurricane losses, although a general increase in recent years reflects the growing population in America’s coastal regions.

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany. //

When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.

Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.

Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.

Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.

But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Josef Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Harry Truman administration backed off the plan.

There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force. //

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.

The Biden administration finalized climate regulations to ban most natural gas-powered instantaneous water heaters—a move that critics say will drive up costs for consumers.

The Department of Energy—which formally published the rules the day after Christmas—didn’t issue a press release announcing the action, a departure from past appliance regulations. The published rules say the regulations are expected to help the climate by curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

Overall, under the regulations, roughly 40 percent of the new tankless water heaters available in the United States today will be taken off the market by 2029. Experts and industry officials say that will force consumers to purchase either more expensive or less efficient water heater models. //

One industry analysis estimates that consumers will pay $450 more on average when purchasing new water heaters thanks to the regulations. And that will impact low-income and senior households, which are most reliant on the models targeted by the Department of Energy.

Here's the thing - there are two different photosynthetic pathways that food crops use, called C3 and C4 photosynthesis. There is a third - CAM photosynthesis - which doesn't play as big a role in agriculture. C3 photosynthesis is an older process, that developed at a time when atmospheric CO2 levels were decidedly higher than now. The C4 process arose later, mostly in corn, sorghum, and sugarcane. It's a more efficient process, as one might expect, since it developed at a time of lower CO2 levels. Both types employ the Calvin cycle to produce sugars, but the C4 process uses a more efficient four-carbon-atom intermediary - thus the name, C4.

However, a great deal of human food crops utilize the older C3 process. This means that an increase in atmospheric CO2 more closely approximates the condition in which C3 photosynthesis originated. This results in increased crop yield in C3 plants. As Vijay Jayaraj writes:

Higher ambient CO2 levels allow C3 plants to photosynthesize more efficiently while losing less water. The benefits of elevated CO2 aren’t merely theoretical, as proven in field studies that have confirmed laboratory findings.

These studies, conducted in real-world conditions, show consistent yield increases across various C3 crops. Wheat yields increase by 20-30% under elevated CO2 conditions, while rice shows increases of between 15-32%. Soybeans, another crucial C3 crop, exhibit yield increases of up to 46% in some studies.

Perhaps nowhere is the CO2 effect more evident than in greenhouse cultivation. Modern greenhouse operators routinely boost productivity by elevating CO2 levels to 800-1,000 parts per million (ppm), which are well above current atmospheric levels of around 420 ppm. The results are striking: tomato yields increase by 40-50%, cucumber production rises by 30-40%, and growth of lettuce and other vegetables accelerates significantly. //

A resolution worth adopting this New Year would be to reject the coordinated demonization of CO2 by climate scaremongers and to celebrate it for what it is: the gas of life.