The Latest On International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

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  • When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”

  • In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”

  • Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.

  • Surely, no court would take this seriously.

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The New York Times Addresses The Culture War In New York City Public Schools

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  • I doubt that there are any public schools in the country more completely under the thumb of the teachers unions and the radical Left than the New York City public schools.

  • With relentless advocacy for more funding and smaller class sizes, the unions and their allies have achieved what may seem like public school utopia: $37.5 billion of funding for 937,000 students in the current school year, which comes to just over $40,000 per student. (By contrast, according to educationdata.org, the average per pupil spending in the U.S. for the 2023-24 year is $13,701, while the state most comparable to New York, Florida, spends just $11,800.).

  • Yet, for all the spending, our schools somehow achieve sub-par results for the students, and on top of that are consumed with all the standard leftist obsessions, from socialism to “anti-racism” (aka racism) to LGBT and trans rights. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the districts have started to get some push back from parents on at least some of these issues. To me, the push back seems to be remarkably low key.

  • Today’s New York Times has an entertaining front-page article on this subject.

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European Conservatives: How Has Fossil Fuel Suppression Worked Out For You?

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European Conservatives: How Has Fossil Fuel Suppression Worked Out For You?

  • Throughout the West, the cult of fossil fuel suppression presents itself as an orthodoxy from which no dissent is permitted.

  • In the U.S., there has been substantial and growing resistance to the enforcement of that orthodoxy, among Republicans in general and particularly from red and energy-producing states.

  • By contrast, in Europe, there has been little push-back. Somewhere along the line, in country after country, the drive for Net Zero carbon emissions got the backing of an effective all-political-party consensus. In a gigantic political miscalculation, many mainstream center-right conservative parties got fully on board.

  • That mistake now looks to destroy several of these parties in the major countries.

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Another Candidate For The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?

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  • I have written a long series of posts, now 32 in number, titled “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Go to this link if you want to read some or all of those posts.

  • The fraud in question in those posts is the intentional alteration of pre-existing temperature (or, in one case, sea level) records to create a narrative of dangerous climate change that, without the alterations, lacks support in the raw data. In the most recent post in this series, number 32, I remarked, “No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.”

  • The climate-data-alteration fraud is hugely significant because the altered data provide the fundamental support for the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar effort of the Left to transform the world energy system, and ultimately the entire world economy. As the least expensive and most reliable forms of energy production get restricted, billions of people stand to see their lives impoverished to the extent of tens of thousands of dollars per year each. Is it remotely possible for any other fraud to come anywhere close to this one in significance?

  • As unlikely as it may seem, now along comes a second plausible candidate for the title.

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Loss Of U.S. Moral Authority Undermines Democracy Around The World

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  • Around the world today, lots of countries claim to be “democracies”; but then the state thugs use various ploys to assure that no opposition can ever prevail. Among such ploys, the tactic currently in vogue is to gin up some collection of flimsy criminal charges to get the opposition leader and/or his/her supporters arrested or otherwise sidelined.

  • If you haven’t been following the subject closely in recent months, you may not realize how pervasive the use of this tactic has become.

  • Sure, imprisoning the opposition leaders has long been part of the playbook of the worst thugocracies. It’s what you would expect of a small-time African dictatorship or of a Central American banana republic, not to mention the likes of Russia or China.

  • But recently the tactic has been spreading like a case of poison ivy to countries otherwise pretending to grown-up, or semi-grown-up, status. Countries like India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. And, did I mention, the United States — once known for claiming to be the shining exemplar for the world of good governance, and for seeking to use its moral authority to induce others to follow its lead. Today, governing cliques in other countries are greatly emboldened by the brazen abuse of power orchestrated by Biden and the gaggle of Democratic prosecutors pursuing Trump. Hey, we’re just conducting business the same way you Americans do in your own country! You have no standing to criticize us!

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

  • The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time.

  • Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to keep the subject in the public consciousness.

  • As small and lonely as our voices may be, somehow we must be getting under their skin. We know that because increasingly officialdom feels a need to respond publicly to our criticisms.

  • But how can they give a plausible response, given that we are absolutely right and a wind-and-sun-based electricity system is never going to work?

  • Easy! — Just treat the public like morons.

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