Tag: climate change

Commentary: Making Climate Change a Republican Issue in 2024

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Out of sheer perversity, I follow stories in the Washington Post related to weather. It matters not what the weather brings, the cause is global warming (or climate change depending on the temperature of the disaster). Having a flood? Global warming. Got a heavy snow or ice storm? Climate change. They haven’t yet figured out how to blame earthquakes on global warming, but the mainstream media will probably find a cause and effect relationship somehow.

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Commentary: Mounting Evidence That ‘Net-Zero’ Carbon Emissions Isn’t Achievable

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff
Power Plant

Arizona State University President Michael Crow believes we are in such danger that we should amend the U.S. Constitution to empower the government to deal more expansively with climate change. Crow’s view that constitutional protections of our liberties should be eliminated when they become inconvenient wouldn’t square with the founders, but his estimate of the dangers and required remedies for our changing climate are quite mainstream in our society.

“Net zero by 2050” has become an article of faith among our corporate and academic elites, no longer requiring proof or intellectual defense. The notion that we must eliminate or “offset” all carbon emissions by mid-century if we want to save the planet is the organizing principle for ESG investing. ESG is the consideration of environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance issues when deciding what companies to invest in. In 2022, it was mentioned more than 6000 times in corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Biden Admin’s Regulatory Overhaul Will Burden Americans in the Name of Fighting Climate Change

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

President Joe Biden’s administration finalized guidance Thursday likely to burden Americans with costlier regulations to fulfill administration priorities such as combating climate change.

Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is enacting new guidance that would require regulators to consider priorities like inequality and climate change when analyzing the costs and benefits of regulation. The White House argued the guidance is necessary so that regulations are issued with up-to-date analysis and information.

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Proposed SEC Climate Disclosure Rule Will Add Costs That Consumers Will Bear, Critics Warn

Just the News

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) has been slammed with comments from supporters and critics of its proposed climate disclosure rule.

The release of the final rule has been continually delayed, but its publication is anticipated in the next few months. Congressional Democrats are urging for it to be done sooner rather than later.

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Commentary: Climate Data Refutes Crisis Narrative

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

On September 16, with great fanfare, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced his office had filed a lawsuit against five major oil companies. Accusing them of knowingly misleading the public regarding the alleged harm that fossil fuels would inflict on the climate, Bonta’s office seeks billions in compensatory damages. But the climate change theory that Bonta’s case relies on must ultimately be validated by observational data. And the data does not support the theory.

Suing oil companies is becoming big business. Along with California, state and local government climate change lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry have been filed in Oregon, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and Hawaii. Alleging these companies have directly caused global warming and extreme weather, they seek damages for consumer fraud, public nuisance, negligence, racketeering, erosion, flooding and fires.

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Commentary: We Know Exactly What ‘De-Development’ Means

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

by Roger Kimball   “The climate crisis,” said Al Gore at the U.N. a couple of days ago, “is a fossil fuel crisis.” “What climate crisis?” you might be asking, and you would be right to do so. Yes, it is impossible to turn anywhere in our enlightened, environmentally conscious world without…

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Ramaswamy Blasts DeSantis ‘Monster PAC’ Following Report of Fake News Dirty Politics

M.D. Kittle

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is blasting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and “Monster PAC” following a report exposing the political action committee\’s campaign in “spreading dirt” and “misstatements” about the poll-rising Ramaswamy.

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NASA Scientist Suffers ‘Climate Grief,’ Cries Due to Drought

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

A professor and NASA scientist recently shared her “climate grief” and how she copes with the stress in an article for Nature.

Kimberley Miner, a professor at Virginia Tech and the University of Maine, shared a story of breaking down in tears when she realized a California drought would mean some blue oaks would die.

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More Than 1,600 Scientists, Nobel Laureates, Declare ‘Climate Emergency’ a Myth

Just the News

A coalition of 1,609 scientists from around the world have signed a declaration stating “there is no climate emergency” and that they “strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy” being pushed across the globe. The declaration does not deny the harmful effect of greenhouse gasses, but instead challenges the hysteria brought about by the narrative of imminent doom.

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If Biden Declares Climate Emergency, Experts Worry How Wide the Scope of His Powers Would Be

Just the News

Last week, President Joe Biden said during an interview that his administration “already” declared a national emergency over climate change, before starting to clarify that he practically — not actually — had.

CNN called the statement “incorrect” but there is widespread speculation he will declare one soon. Citing anonymous White House sources, The Washington Post reported in July that Biden is considering whether to declare a national climate emergency in the coming weeks.

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2024 Presidential Hopefuls Address Questions About the Future of the EPA and Biden Administration’s Climate Legislation

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Several 2024 Republican presidential candidates would defund the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and repeal President Joe Biden’s signature climate law if elected, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gas prices are rising, power plants are closing and regulations are impacting internal combustion engine vehicles and appliances like water heaters. Along with slashing the EPA and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), many GOP hopefuls also pledged to withdraw from the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement if they secure the White House in 2024, several candidates told the DCNF.

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Wisconsin Governor Vetoes Bills Aimed at Protecting Consumers Against Climate Change Alarmist Agenda

M.D. Kittle

Governor Tony Evers turned to his veto pen once again last week, this time killing consumer protection bills that interfered with his far-left climate change agenda, according to the state’s largest business lobby.

The Democrat vetoed Assembly Bills 141 and 142, and Senate Bill 49, among 10 Republican-led bills killed by a governor who has used the state’s powerful veto pen more liberally than any governor in Badger State history.

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Commentary: Climate Alarmists Are Finally Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud in Their Agenda

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The Los Angeles Times published an op/ed Friday in which it perhaps unintentionally poses the central proposition of the mythical energy transition: “whether our expectations should evolve in the name of preventing climate catastrophe.”

The op/ed is appropriately titled, “Would an Occasional Blackout Help Solve Climate Change?” It is a headline that tacitly admits a truth about the transition that boosters of renewable energy have been careful not to publicize: That the notion that generation sources with extremely low energy density like wind and solar cannot hope to be viable alternatives to generation with extremely high energy density like natural gas, nuclear and coal. It is a notion that defies the laws of thermodynamics and physics, and those are laws, not suggestions that can be discarded as a matter of convenience or, as in this case, in pursuit of a hyper-political agenda.

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Commentary: Bidenomics Is Behind Jerome Powell’s Woke Turn

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In February 2021, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress, “We are not climate policymakers here who can decide the way climate change will be addressed by the United States. We’re a regulatory agency that regulates a part of the economy.” When Powell said that, less than a month into the Biden administration, inflation was 1.6%.

Just eight months later, in remarks on November 22, 2021, President Biden said Powell – then up for renomination and facing stiff opposition from congressional progressives – “made clear to me: A top priority will be to accelerate the Fed’s effort to address and mitigate the risks – the risk that climate change poses to our financial system and our economy.” At that time inflation was 6.8%, on its way up to a 40-year high of 9.1%.

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Republican AGs Push Back Against ‘Reckless’ Plan from Biden’s EPA That Could Further Hobble American Coal

Admin

by Nick Pope   Several state attorneys general are engaging in legal battles against President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine whether or not his administration will be able to impose its costly plan for implementing a regulation designed to further incapacitate the American coal industry. Multiple states…

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Report: Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers Uses Third-Party Funding from the United Nations Foundation to Pay for Far-Left Climate Change Initiatives

M.D. Kittle

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature wouldn’t go along with Governor Tony Evers’ far-left climate change and “environmental justice” initiatives, so the Democrat went around the legislature.

Evers took in hundreds of thousands of dollars in third-party funding from media tycoon Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation, according to a new report from the Institute for Reforming Government’s Center for Investigative Oversight.

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From MSNBC to ‘The Guardian:’: Media’s Sympathetic Coverage of Climate Activists’ Vandalism of Priceless Art

Admin

This week, the world witnessed yet another act of vandalism in the name of climate change when two Swedish nurses tried to glue themselves to a Monet art piece in Stockholm’s National Museum, then smear it with red paint.

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Commentary: As Toxic as It Is Effective, Governments Wield Fear to Control and Manipulate People

Admin

by Kathleen Marquardt   People are excited thinking about being able to live in alternative universes. Unbeknownst to them, they already do – and have been for most of their lives. Especially those born after the era when we wore our Texas Instrument calculators on our belts (our slide rules were…

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Commentary: The Nonsensical ‘Holy Climate Panacea’ Triad of More Wind, Solar, and Electric Cars is Maddening

RealClearWire

This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.

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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Energy Companies’ Appeals to Climate Damage Lawsuits

Admin

The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear local governments’ climate damage lawsuits against energy companies on Monday.

The companies, who localities want to hold financially accountable for burning fossil fuels they allege damaged the climate, appealed their cases to the Supreme Court, asking it to weigh in on whether the claims should be heard in state or federal courts. The Court’s decision benefits the environmental activists behind the lawsuits, who prefer the matter to play out in state courts, where judges may be more inclined to rule in their favor, experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Europe Imposes First-Ever ‘Climate Tax’ on Imported Goods

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The European Parliament finalized legislation Tuesday that will impose taxes on imports based on the greenhouse gas emissions made during their production, despite the objections raised by companies in the U.S. and China.

The European Union’s (E.U.) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) would first take effect in 2026, and first cover emissions from companies producing iron, steel, cement, aluminum, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, according to the European Parliament. The taxes have been criticized by firms in the U.S., who are concerned about unnecessary regulation and red tape, and firms in China and the developing world, who use less green sources of energy than competitors in the U.S. and E.U., according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Commentary: ‘Net Zero’ Is Not a Rational U.S. Energy Policy

RealClearWire

Despite Germany’s last-ditch attempt at realism, the European Union recently approved a 2035 ban on gas-powered cars, moving ahead with its “net zero” emissions agenda. In the U.S., the cost of achieving net-zero carbon emissions would be staggering – $50 trillion if the goal is reached by 2050 – as would the demand for raw materials, which in most cases would exceed current annual worldwide production. 

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Biden’s World Bank Pick Calls for ‘Trillions’ in Climate Spending

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard that President Joe Biden has nominated to head the World Bank, told Axios Wednesday that both the bank and the private sector needed to spend “trillions” to combat both climate change and poverty.

Banga has been aggressively campaigning for the job, meeting with officials from 37 different governments in the past three weeks, Axios reported. The World Bank faces competing pressure from wealthy and developing countries over whether to focus on combatting climate change or poverty mitigation, but Banga said he does not view the two goals as inherently opposed to one another.

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Pentagon’s ‘Strategic Management Plan’ Devotes Roughly One Out of Every Six Pages to Diversity, Climate Change

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Nearly one of every six pages of a document detailing the Pentagon’s management strategy are devoted to combating climate change and fulfilling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

The Strategic Management Plan for 2022 to 2026, released Tuesday, covers 124 pages and underscores the actions the Department of Defense (DOD) is taking to fulfill the Biden administration’s broader national defense strategy. It lays out high-level, long term goals and steps the department will take to accomplish those objectives and overcome anticipated challenges, as well as performance metrics for so-called Agency Priority Goals (APGs) that include climate and diversity targets.

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Bill Aims to Protect Rural Wisconsinites from Negative Effects of Wind Turbines

M.D. Kittle

In January, the top of a massive wind turbine crashed down on a field in rural Dodge County, not far from the town of Herman. 

The impact scattered pieces of blades and large chunks of debris. Nobody was hurt—this time. 

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The World Bank’s New Focus on Climate Threatens World’s Poorest Nations, Researchers Say

Admin

The World Bank’s plan to focus future efforts on climate change will have a disproportionately negative impact on its poorest client nations, despite those same countries having repeatedly reported that they would prefer the bank focus on other issues, researchers at the Center for Global Development (CGD) reported Thursday.

The Biden administration named former MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga as its nominee to replace the outgoing Trump appointee David Malpass as president of the World Bank Thursday, a key step in the administration’s efforts to refocus the agency from poverty prevention and take more climate action. However, just 6% of public and private representatives from 43 client nations listed climate change as one of the top three issues facing their country, according to a review of surveys conducted by the World Bank in 2020 and 2021, the GCD researchers reported.

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Wisconsin Law Firm Sues Biden Administration over Woke ESG Investing Policies

M.D. Kittle

The Biden administration’s woke Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) policies are putting politics ahead of people and hurting retirees savings, a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.

The complaint, filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) on behalf of two Waukesha County residents, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting the U.S. Department of Labor from implementing its controversial ESG rule, pending the resolution of the lawsuit. Ultimately, the suit seems a declamatory judgment that the rule violates federal law on administrative powers.

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Wisconsin Law Firm Sues Biden Administration over Woke ESG Investing Policies

M.D. Kittle

The Biden administration’s woke Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) policies are putting politics ahead of people and hurting retirees savings, a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.

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Left-Wing Megadonor George Soros Touts Plan to ‘Repair the Climate System’

Just the News

Liberal megadonor George Soros spoke in support of using an experimental weather control technology to alleviate global warming during a speech last week in Germany.

Soros, who has given millions of dollars to climate change groups through his nonprofit Open Society Foundations, touted a theoretical project to “repair the climate system” by creating white clouds that reflect sunlight away from certain warming areas with the goal of preventing ice sheets in Greenland from melting, Fox News reported.

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Commentary: Somalia’s Problem Isn’t Climate Change, It’s the Climate Agenda

Admin

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently appeared on NPR’s “News Hour” to discuss the looming catastrophe in Somalia and call for more aid to the troubled east African nation. In her interview, she repeatedly cited climate change as the reason for Somalia’s current predicament.

Framing problems, whether they occur in Syria, Somalia, or California, as primarily the result of “climate change” is inaccurate and unhelpful. The drought in the Horn of Africa is indeed severe, so bad, in fact, that NPR reports it as “the worst drought in 40 years.”

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Fake Meat Industry Implodes After Years of Hype

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The meat substitute market is collapsing after its meteoric rise, with key players in the industry facing massive layoffs and plummeting sales.

Fake meat products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which advertise themselves as healthy and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat, soared to national popularity in 2019 when they began selling their products with massive fast food chains. Impossible Foods was moving toward laying off 20% of its staff in late January just months after its competitor, Beyond Meat, announced plans to cut a fifth of its own workforce, according to Bloomberg.

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Soros and Bezos Back Initiative to Raise $3 Trillion Annually to Fight Climate Change

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Left-wing billionaire George Soros and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are helping a World Economic Forum (WEF) climate financing program that aims to raise $3 trillion annually to help slash emissions and restore “nature loss” by 2050.

The WEF and the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations and Bezos Earth Fund, along with more than 43 other nonprofits, businesses and academic institutions, will become part of the “Giving to Amplify Earth Action” (GAEA) initiative that will fund efforts intended to limit global warming, according to a Tuesday WEF announcement. GAEA and its partners will finance charitable partnerships between public and private entities while identifying where the $3 trillion in funding is most needed.

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Commentary: The Coming Dark Age, Courtesy of our 21st Century Government

Admin

Certain basic functions of everyday life distinguish us from animals. Our use of fire is among them. We cook with it, heat with it, and light the darkness with it. In many ways, fire on the stove is the center of our family life. In days of our ancestors, we even kept wild animals at bay with torches burning hot with the rendered fat of animals.

Now the United States federal government is coming for our fire. It’s to protect the children, the federal government says, through an unelected bureaucrat who wants to regulate gas cookstoves out of existence.

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Commentary: The Left Sacrifices Natural Gas at the Altar of Climate Nirvana Leaving Good Americans Freeze to Death

Admin

The just-departed polar vortex confirmed that when Mother Nature is enraged, it’s wise to have options. Maddeningly, today’s “pro-choice” Democrats want Americans to have one energy choice.

Neo-totalitarian, Left-wing eco-extremists are banning new natural-gas access in scores of locales. If not reversed, this cruel, stupid, needless policy will kill Americans.

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Commentary: ESG and the Perpetually Just-Over the Horizon Climate Apocalypse

RealClearWire

Concern about catastrophic climate change has been the biggest factor driving ESG, yet the likelihood of climate change being catastrophic and the attainment of net zero are not open to debate or challenge by participants in financial markets. In the last of his four part review of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, Rupert Darwall argues that this undermines the function of financial markets as efficient, unsentimental allocators of people’s savings in a way that maximizes growth and economic well-being.

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Wisconsin Senator Johnson and Colleagues Urge White House to Reverse Major Climate Policies

Bradley Vasoli

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson wrote jointly with several colleagues to President Joe Biden this week urging him to reverse major elements of his anti-fossil-fuel agenda. 

The letter from the senators takes issue with several actions the White House has taken to hinder investment in and use of oil, natural gas and coal in an effort the administration insists is important to lessening global warming. 

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Commentary: Climate Change Skeptics Have Ready Allies in Africa

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

This is a question without an answer. But for nearly three weeks in November, over 35,000 people including heads of state and the global corps d’elite, pretended they were solving what they claim is the most urgent crisis in the world—the climate emergency—while ignoring the only relevant question. What is a practical alternative to fossil fuel?

Also ignored at the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, an event sponsored by some of the world’s biggest corporations and covered, uncritically, by the biggest media conglomerates on earth, was the primary reason for environmental challenges in the 21st century. It’s not fossil fuel. It’s population trends.

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GOP Struggled with Voters 18-29 in 2022 Election over Abortion, Gun Rights, Climate Change

Just the News

The Republican Party struggled with young voters ages 18-29 in the 2022 midterm election, largely due to issues such as abortion, gun rights, and climate change, according to an analysis from Look Ahead Strategies. 

CNN found that House Democratic candidates “won voters under 30 by 28 points,” which was a two-point increase over the 2020 election data for that age group.

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Obama to Campaign with Warnock Urging Georgians to Cast Early Ballots in Runoff

Susan Berry, PhD

Former President Barack Obama will rally with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) on December 1, and urge Georgians to cast early ballots for Warnock in his runoff U.S. Senate race against Republican Herschel Walker.

According to a report at NBC News, Obama’s team said, following the former president’s rally for Warnock at the end of October, attendees “signed up to complete hundreds of door knocking shifts.”

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REVIEW: The Book Climate Industrial Complex Doesn’t Want You to Read

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

When it comes to environmental policy, the only “solutions” coming from liberal politicians activists involve radically restructuring society and centralizing more power in the government — while, of course, handing out billions in tax dollars to politically-favored special interests.

Whether it’s the Paris climate accords, Green New Deal or the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act, these political schemes to remake the economy often end up enriching the climate industrial complex and empowering unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies.

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‘Scam’: Greta Thunberg Is Boycotting the United Nations Climate Summit

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg will not be attending the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt because she believes that the conference fails to effectively push the environmental agenda.

Thunberg on Sunday declared COP27 to be a “scam” where world leaders feign concern for the “climate crisis” to get attention during a question and answer session at the launch of her new book in London. The 19-year-old environmentalist said that world leaders are endangering the planet by “lying and cheating” instead of implementing “major changes” to reduce carbon emissions.

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Commentary: Climate Extremism Is Making America Mentally Ill

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

America is floundering in an epidemic of anxiety, depression and drug use.

One in six Americans takes some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly antidepressants, a medical study concluded, and some of them (Prozac and Paxil) are linked to acts of violence. A third of high school students cannot shake feelings of sadness or hopelessness, another report found, and nearly 2 0% of teens have contemplated suicide.

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Commentary: America’s Schools Warm to Climate Activism

RealClearWire

Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism. 

As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action,  a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute. 

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Commentary: It’s Time to Take Down the Cult of Climate Change for Good

Admin

When you look at climate alarmists, there are really only two options: they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re lying.

The “Little Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’”-like cries of “existential threats” brought on by climate change would be hilarious, if it wasn’t for the disastrous impact from misguided actions to “fix” the problem. However, the fable about a youngster fabricating an emergency time and again isn’t that far off from today’s climate-change evangelists; they both need to recognize their stories are quickly losing credibility.

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Democrat-Led Cities Are Responding to Heat Waves by Hiring Climate Bureaucrats

Admin

Major cities across the U.S. are employing climate officials to help manage the response to “extreme heat” conditions, according to The Washington Post.

Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix have appointed “chief heat officers” to mitigate the effects of climate change and to protect the city’s low-income minority residents, whom they deem especially vulnerable to high temperatures, reported the Post. Currently, heat waves are sweeping across the U.S. with temperatures reaching up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit in states like Texas and Oklahoma, according to Yahoo News.

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Supreme Court Delivers Massive Blow to Biden’s Climate Agenda

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The Supreme Court delivered a massive blow to the Biden administration’s climate change plan Thursday, severely limiting the power of federal agencies.

The Court, in a 6-3 decision on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), limited the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, significantly curtailing the power of the federal agency. The decision restricts the agency to regulating individual power plants and not the entire power sector.

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Wisconsin Dairy Farmers Worry About SEC Climate Change Reporting Plan

The Center Square

There is growing worry among Wisconsin dairy farmers about a new climate change plan for investors.

The Venture Dairy Cooperative is sounding the alarm about the Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking to require companies to report information about their “greenhouse gas pollution and be transparent with investors about climate-related risks.”

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