Road to Hell for America

In recent testimony before a Congressional panel, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon provided a rare example of a prominent banker “speaking truth to power.” Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic Representative from Michigan and a member of the Progressive Squad, asked for a simple "Yes" or "No" answer to this question: “Does your bank have a policy against funding new oil or gas products?” Dimon responded simply and directly.

“ Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America.”

Instead of asking for an explanation, Tlaib could only threaten Dimon and his bank with a kind of boycott. She suggested that people should withdraw their accounts from his bank even though she had previously claimed that banks like his were refusing to offer banking services to minorities.

Perhaps, Representative Tlaid should have issued a subpoena to President Biden to testify before her committee. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on September 23, Alexander Zemak noted that the Biden administration has so far released over 200 Million barrels of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum reserve. That withdrawal represents about 30% of the reserves leaving us with the lowest level since 1984. Despite the concerns of climate alarmists like Representative Tlaib, these reserves are going to be burned somewhere.

What emergency prompted the President to deplete our energy reserves to such an extent, especially without asking representatives like Tlaib to even vote on the matter? It is true that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has interrupted oil and gas deliveries to Europe, but we were not dependent on Russian energy. Nor were we dependent on Arab production. In fact, when President Biden took office, we were so energy independent, that we were exporting oil, natural gas, and even coal abroad.

The Biden Administration itself created the emergency. Almost immediately on taking office, the new President used an executive order to put a stop to the construction of the Keystone pipeline that would transport Canadian crude oil to American refineries. With another executive order, he put a hold on fracking on Federal lands. 

The President also did not bother to consult Congress in issuing these orders. It seems obvious that he and his handlers were out to put an end to the use of fossil fuels in America. Aside from the fact that his actions put many people out of work, they also increased energy costs for everyone. We had an energy system that worked, and they broke it. 

The real emergency came earlier this year when gas prices at the pump doubled and even tripled in some areas, and became a major factor in the rise of inflation. The Biden administration and the Democratic party saw this spike in energy prices as a serious threat to their prospects in the coming mid-term elections. The red wave threatening them would have become a tsunami unless prices at the pump could be driven down.

I have read that we have sufficient oil and gas reserves underground to supply all of our energy needs for 400 years. We have plenty of time to figure out if we are really in a climate crisis, and if we can do anything about it. Look at the technological progress we have made in just the past 100 years. There are signs that the hasty panaceas we are trying now can do more harm than good. Just this week, a large Lithium battery burst into fire in a huge battery storage facility in California. Nearby residents were urged to stay indoors, and a highway was shut down for fear of toxic fumes. 

There is strong evidence that the world is not facing an imminent climate catastrophe. China and India, the world’s two most populous countries by far, do not seem concerned. They are importing fossil fuel from Russia. China is even building its own coal plants.  Maybe Representative Tlaib should subpoena their leaders. 

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Climate Science

  

    

I have been a Climate Change skeptic but now, after reading M.J. Sangster’s, The Real Inconvenient Truth,  a 2018 book on all the factors that make up the Earth’s climate, I now accept the opprobrious label of Climate Change Denier (CCD). It is not that I deny that the Earth might be in a warming phase, or that the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been increasing over the last 100 years. 

But in Sangster’s extremely well-researched book, he demonstrates that human-caused CO2, is a tiny fraction of the CO2 produced by nature, and that it makes up an  even tinier fraction of Greenhouse gases (GHG) which are 95% water vapor. In other words, human caused CO2, is little more than a drop in the vast ocean that is our atmosphere. Despite the claims of Climate Change Alarmists (CCA), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), human-caused or natural, is not poisoning the planet. Here are some facts from Sangster’s book.

 

“Carbon dioxide  (CO2) is not a toxic gas; it plays a vital role in plant and animal processes, including photosynthesis [CO2+sunlight+Water produces Plant food (carbohydrates) + Oxygen). Obviously, we need the oxygen, and plants need the carbohydrates.” … [199]

“That CO2 is directly correlated with temperature is not the issue however, the issue is whether or not the relationship is the dominate climate driver in the presence of other natural events and feedbacks, and clearly it is not or, as CO2 increases linearly, so too would temperature… It is just one climate forcing event in a complex Earth system… “[198]

 

The major factors in the complex Earth climate system are the Sun, Tectonics, Wind and Ocean Circulation, Oceanic Oscillations, Clouds and Aerosols, and Greenhouse Gases.  Sangster devotes a chapter to each of these factors and they are must reads for anyone really interested in following the science. Actually, his book is a fascinating introduction to Earth science. Did you know, for example:

That the Sun revolves in a relatively circular orbit around the nucleus of our galaxy at a speed of over 500,000 miles per hour. It takes 11 Earth years to complete its immense orbit, and drags us along with it although we don’t feel a thing. On route, we pass through fields of cosmic rays that bombard us. Our atmosphere protects us, but these cosmic rays still effect our climate. 

That the plate tectonics that formed our continents is still going on and generating vast amounts of energy. They also create mountain ranges. Did you know that 85% of the Earth’s volcanos are below the surface of the oceans?

That wind and Ocean circulation is a major factor in our climate. Without the warm waters of the tropical Gulf Stream, Northern Europe would be uninhabitable.

That clouds play a key role in regulating our climate. Some let in needed heat from the Sun, while others reflect it back into space. As noted above, water vapor makes up 95% of the greenhouse gas that keeps heat in, and that prevents the entire planet from looking like Antarctica. Sangster quotes former President Obama’s Science Czar, Dr, John Holdren: “a 1% increase in cloud cover would decrease the surface temperature by .8 degree C., the entire warming amount attributed to CO2 since the start of the Industrial Age.” [196]

That water vapor makes up 99% of the greenhouse gases that help regulate our climate, and that it is entirely natural. There is nothing we can do about it this fact, or any of the other facts noted above. 

Finally, Sangster points out a basic truth: “Earth is the only planet in the solar system with an atmosphere that can sustain life. The blanket of atmospheric gases not only contains the air we breathe but also modulates the energy balance… “[197].

I have limited this post to Climate Science. The rest of “The Real Inconvenient Truth” deals with the politics of Climate Science. We will deal with that in subsequent posts, but for now I will just say that it appears to me that it is the height of hubris to think that humans can combat the vast and powerful natural forces that have shaped our Earth on its incredible journey through space and time. 

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Educational Bigotry

The Connecticut Mirror, an online newspaper recently published an article exposing the bias of a school administrator’s hiring practices in wealthy Greenwich. Caught on a hidden camera, the assistant principal admitted to an interviewer that he would never hire a conservative, a Catholic, or anyone over the age of 40. He claimed, with a kind of smug satisfaction, that such people were stuck in their ways and could never be changed into the kind of teacher he wanted for his school in wealthy Greenwich. 

What kind of teachers did he want? He preferred young left-leaning candidates who could be molded into what he wanted. In the elementary school classrooms they would not have to express a political or ideological bias, but just treat left wing positions as the norm, not even subject to debate or discussion. The goal would be to create young Democrats. 

He had developed a series of questions that he used in a 30-minute interview to weed out the undesirables. Of course, he could not ask them directly about their religion, or politics but there were ways to guess. If he suspected they were Conservative or Catholic, they would not be considered for the job. He would not even grant interviews with experienced applicants over the age of 40 because they also tended to be stuck in their ways.

The article in the Connecticut Mirror included the 12-minute video in which not once did the administrator indicate an awareness that he was violating a variety of State laws against such discrimination, laws largely drafted by liberals in blue state Connecticut. Neither did he indicate any awareness that he himself was rigid, bigoted, and stuck in his ways. 

The exposure of the Greenwich school administrator was the work of an organization called Project Veritas that tries to expose those in public office who engage in such misbehavior. The CT Mirror tried to criticize the organization but there was the video which could not be denied. The cat was out of the bag. The administrator was subsequently suspended pending the inevitable investigations, and even Democratic politicians had to complain about such unfair and bigoted hiring practices.

Nevertheless, I believe that the assistant principal in Greenwich was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I suspect that there are thousands like him all over the country whose goal is not education but indoctrination. It is no secret that more than 90% of college professors are left-leaning Democrats. Faculties at colleges of education, that turn out the teachers, must be even more liberal. 

I wonder if the assistant principal actually knows any Catholics or conservatives? Is he unaware of the many outstanding Catholic teachers that have served in Greenwich and other Connecticut public schools for as long as I can remember? Many of them were clients of mine when I worked as a financial advisor. Just like their non-Catholic colleagues, there was the good, the bad, and the ordinary among them. 

I recall one Catholic client who was stuck in her ways. She taught in an elementary school in nearby Bridgeport, where her students were mainly minority children. She was generally regarded as the best teacher of reading in the school. For years, she taught under-privileged and disadvantaged children how to read.  Reading is the foundation of all learning. When I asked her how she did it, she said she used phonics despite the official method recommend by school administrators. When an administrator planned to visit the classroom, she had the children hide the phonics materials in their desks. When the visitor left, they could get back to the work of learning how to read. It was not a matter of faith with her. Phonics just worked. Her children learned how to read. She was interested in education, not indoctrination. If anything, she was a great teacher because she was Catholic. 

A few years ago when an inner-city Catholic parochial school teacher was asked why she taught in a school where most of the students were not Catholic, she replied, “We teach them not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

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