Environmental Myths

Plastic Pastors | Environmental Myths In the Pulpit

Published by Papa Giorgio

The original video [2010] had some text I inserted in it that was unreadable. So I switched up the graphics in the texts spot. Plus I split the video into two to deal with THAT specific topic, individually below. They are:

Trash Islands, and, Water Bottles.

INTRODUCTION

While I criticize some stats in the two excerpts of a sermon here, take note that both the pastor and the church involved are one of the better pastors/churches in our valley (SCV) and the whole of the message is not affected by this portion. This sermon was preached on 7-11-2010. This was repotted here in 2016 from an old blog.

My main point is that when one goes to organizations that are driven by an almost eco-fascist drive or some emergent liberalism, you are going to get skewed stats. This sermon merely gives me the opportunity to critique eco-leftists ideology.

Again, I would not tell people not to go to this church. It is a wonderful church and I would encourage visiting and joining. (I chose not to name the church or pastor because many people may not understand the nuances I am pointing out and may over react.)

Pastors are people too — they are not all-knowing. Likewise, they can be influenced by the united cacophony of media, entertainment, and the like, just as many I know are. I just happened to be “in the know,” this pastor has other [more important] aspects of his office to be knowledgeable in — not to be versed in every jot and tittle of the culture war.

The original title, and thus URL for this post was:

  • Plastic Pastors Critiquing an Otherwise Great Sermon

I wasn’t going to post on this subject, and all-in-all, this topic is one Christians have the moral superiority in.

A poignant point from a discussion about Global Warming via a professor I admire:

…one that bedevils an atheist philosopher friend of mine: “if human beings are part of nature, then why is that we, rather than the chimpanzee, have a special responsibility to care for nature. And if we do have this responsibility, what is its limits and rightful powers? Is irrigation moral if it leads to human flourishing, or should we ask the beavers for their permission?” I am not being facetious. If there is nothing special about us–if we have not been given “dominion” over nature, as the Bible teaches–then it seems that the atheist environmentalist has a very tough time explaining why we should be in charge and what technological innovation that disturbs natural patterns is appropriate for that responsibility. Hence, Christian environmentalism is far more defensible than any secular variety, IMHO.

(Francis Beckwith quoting a friend)

BUT, stats and movements founded on these false statistics shouldn’t be used in the pulpit. When the secular left rejects true religion, they supplement their spiritual quest with that of fallible mans quest as the object of their religion. Which is why many call — rightly so — modern day environmentalism a religion.

A recipe for disaster.

So pastors should be wary of this stretching of man’s credibility found all-too-often in the environmental progressive left. Likewise, this leftism has infected the church. Here is an exceprt from a book written by “emergent leaders” that will shed some light on how this man-made religion infects the church. This is taken from an old post entitled, “Feminist Extremism, Eastern Concepts in Youth Specialties and Gaia in Emergence“:

Via:  A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church.

C is for Creation

What modern secularists called “nature” (a term that turned a sacred work of art into a profane source of “raw materials”) and what modern Christians always linked with “versus evolu­tion” (thus turning a sacred mystery into a profane and mis­guided argument).

What ancient Christians viewed, along with Holy Scripture, as one of God’s two primary sources of self-revelation.

What emerging Christians will cherish as God’s art gallery in which we live and of which we are a part and for which we were created as planetary trustees and caretakers.

Later of course we get to the “action” (the “praxy” if you will) behind the emergent meaning:

… For postmoderns, it’s “Mother Earth,” holy ground tragically portrayed in the words of James Merrill: “Father Time and Mother Earth, A marriage on the rocks.” No wonder the word environment is used less and less; it’s too cold a word for this theology of “holy ground.”

If our humaneness is most manifest in our relationships—with swallows and snails, with friends and enemies, with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the modern world needed mar­riage counseling big-time. The willingness to sacrifice living systems for commerce has meant that the lungs and other vital organs of Mother Earth are being cannibalized to the point where “natural” disasters are no longer “natural” but induced.

The mad weather patterns of the past decade are a byproduct of disappearing forests (at current rates of deforestation, Ecuador will be totally barren of trees in 20 years), disappearing healthy air, and disappearing ecosystems….

There are now over 130,000 religion and ecology projects in operation worldwide. Unfortunately, very few of them are emanating from evangelical churches.

So when people like Rob Bell, Ken Blanchard, Leonard Sweet, or Brian McLaren mention “Creation,” Al Gore and Rosemary Ellen Guiley are thrown into the meaning and action taken from that word/concept.

REMEMBER, this church the sermon came from IS NOT an Emergent type church. This sermon merely gives me the opportunity to critique eco-leftists and liberal theology a bit. So the following is a video critique of parts of the sermon followed by more information about the topics:

Floating Trash Islands

(Just so you are “in the know,” Patrick Moore is the co-founder of Green Peace. He has since left the crazy environmental movement and pushes for common sense — achievable, goals)

Plastic Pastors: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Chapter 6 of Patrick Moore’s book is here, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Full of Plastic and is Twice the Size of Texas.”

  • A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers. Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean. Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Andres Cozar of the University of Cadiz in Spain is the man who once extrapolated the 1 million-ton estimate. Since then, however, he has led research that collected samples at 141 ocean sites. Cozar’s new estimate: Between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic are floating in the ocean. (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Hoax | TOWNHALL)

There Is No Island of Trash in the Pacific: But the cause of clean oceans needed a good story. Our warming planet could use another one (SLATE)

… Moore’s Garbage Patch would grow in size and fame in the years that followed. The plastic-plankton soup he’d first discovered in 1997—which oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer dubbed the “Eastern Garbage Patch” or the “Pacific Garbage Patch”—gained notoriety in a 2006 series for the Los Angeles Times that won a Pulitzer Prize. Its area had doubled: Now the patch was “twice the size of Texas.” (Some reports went even bigger.) As coverage intensified—the patch’s media profile peaked between 2007 and 2009—the soup coalesced into a garbage landmass with a more official name: the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” In 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle called the patch “a massive, eternal, slowly swirling vortex of noxious garbage the size of a continent and the shape of death itself, just floating out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, mocking life, humanity, God.”

But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has always been less substantial than it sounds, less an island in the ocean than a big idea that floats around inside our heads.

[….]

In a way, that’s the very problem the Great Pacific Garbage Patch helped to solve, when the concept was invented. Like its mirror image, the hole in the ozone layer, the patch squeezed and flattened all our worries, sequestering them in a far-off region of the globe.

That’s how and why the patch came into being, both as a fully fledged idea and a media phenomenon, at the turn of the millennium….

MORE ARTICLES:

  • Garbage: Another Environmental Claim Proven to Be Hyped (WUWT)
  • There is no Great Pacific Garbage Patch (PATRICK MOORE)
  • Are We Really “Choking the Ocean with Plastic”? Tracing The Creation of An Eco-Myth (WUWT)
  • The Garbage Philosophy Behind the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Myth (THE FEDERALIST)

Other wise known as “The Great Garbage Patch Charlie Brown!”

This is with a h/t to The Dennis Prager Show:

“Great Garbage Patch” in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists

Claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas is “grossly exaggerated” said the research which reckons it is more like one per cent the size.

Further reports that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, the new research claimed.

In reality it often cannot even be seen from the deck of a passing boat, said the latest analysts from the Oregon State University professor of oceanography Angelicque White.

The scientist took part in a recent marine expedition to examine the mass of plastic that is floating in the ocean and found there was a problem.

But genuine scientific concerns are undermined by scare tactics from those proclaiming the trash patch is so big that there is more plastic than plankton in the Pacific….

Another news source says this:

Size of the Ocean Garbage Patch is “Grossly Exaggerated” (see also OREGON IUNIVERSITY)

The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is often said to be twice the size of Texas—but that and other scary-sounding claims are “grossly exaggerated,” some scientists are now insisting. A new study shows the plastic waste patch is actually 200 times smaller than previously claimed when comparing its mass to the amount of water; if you need a Texas-sized visual, it’s actually closer to 1% of the state’s area, says researcher Angelicque White.

She is quick to add that the amount of plastic in the ocean is definitely “troubling,” but that scare tactics only “undermine the credibility of scientists.” White adds, “it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.” At this point, trying to get rid of the plastic is too expensive and potentially damaging to the ocean’s ecology, the Telegraph reports; White recommends focusing on prevention going forward. Click to read about its sister garbage patch in the Atlantic.

MORE SCARRY HEADLINES:

  • Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now nearly 4 times the size of California
  • The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic
  • The great Pacific garbage patch may be 16 times as massive as we thought
  • Great Pacific Garbage Patch weighs more than 43,000 cars and is much larger than we thought

Remember, the Left leaning SLATE MAGAZINE said it was a lie to cause action. But here is SNOPES noting the two wildly separated views:

The claim that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers “8.1 percent of the Pacific Ocean” is also a matter of debate. The number appeared to come from a 2008 quote from Marcus Eriksen, the research director at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation:

“Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

A 2011 study from Oregon State University, however, asserted that the real size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was hundreds of times smaller than commonly claimed:

There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.

Further claims that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, pointed out Angelicque “Angel” White, an assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State.

“There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists,” White said. “We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”

The studies have shown is that if you look at the actual area of the plastic itself, rather than the entire North Pacific subtropical gyre, the hypothetically “cohesive” plastic patch is actually less than 1 percent of the geographic size of Texas.

“The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial,” White said. “But using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists produces a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size.”

An updated article on this can be found at THE FEDERALIST, and it comes my way with thanks to GAY PATRIOT — now defunct sadly.

Water Bottle Myths

Plastic Pastors: Water Bottles

Myths About Bottled Water Still Confuse Consumers (FOOD BEV)

MYTH 1: Less than one in four people correctly knew that there is no BPA in the plastic used to package bottled water.

FACT: PET is the only plastic used in the UK for bottled water. PET does not contain BPA. The confusion is often made as BPA is a chemical found in another type of plastic called polycarbonate which is most often found in reusable rigid water containers. US studies suggest BPA has a negative impact on human health, and these studies often use the generic term ‘plastic water bottle’ to refer to polycarbonate bottles in their findings.

MYTH 2: Four out of five consumers falsely believe drinking water from a bottle that has been left in the sun can cause cancer.

FACT: It is a myth that plastic water bottles left in cars will leach carcinogens into the water. The health scare began in 2002 when a Japanese television programme broadcast a theory that plastic water bottles were unsafe. These claims have since been discredited by Cancer Research UK say on their website: “There is no convincing scientific evidence to back up these claims or to suggest that any of these products could cause cancer.”

~ MORE ARTICLES ~

  • Can Water from Plastic Bottles Be Toxic? Does reusing, freezing, or warming plastic water bottles cause them to break down into dioxins or carcinogenic compounds? (SNOPES)
  • Researcher dispels Myth of Dioxins and Plastic Water Bottles (JOHN HOPKINS)
  • Does Freezing Plastic Water Bottles Cause Cancer? (VERY WELL HEALTH)
  • Fact Check: Plastic Water Bottles Left in Hot Cars Don’t Release Dioxins, Do Leach Other Chemicals (USA TODAY)
  • The Safety of Beverages in Plastic Bottles (FOOD SAFETY MAGAZINE)
  • Facts About BPA: Myths And Realities (FAB)
  • Plastic Water Bottles (CANCER FACT FINDER)

From an older post, Urban Legends — Water Bottles (Updated HERE), as well on some bottle myths:

I have worked at Whole Foods long enough to hear many of the “health myths” that typically float through the customer base there. One of these myths about health and product is found in the scare about plastic water bottles. It started in an email referencing a masters thesis by a student at the University of Idaho. The media, according to Snopes, ran with the story even though there was no peer reviews of the students work. They have this myth marked as false. Another worth-while article to read is by Carol Rees Parrish, R.D., M.S., entitled, “Bottled Water Myths: Separating Fact from Fiction.” In it it is pointed out that,

Based on the evidence available to date, it appears the true health risks (if any) related to drinking commercially manufactured bottled water or water in refillable plastic bottles may or may not come from the plastic itself. Further study is warranted to determine if poly carbonate plastics can cause harm to humans. Consumers should focus more on the quality of the drinking water, particularly from a microbe perspective as this point is indisputable, rather than chemicals leaching from the container.

Nutrition Issues In Gastroenterology, Series #50 (PDF)

One of the organizations implicated as supporting the health risks by bottled water , John Hopkins, released this statement in their Public Health News Center bulletin:

The Internet is flooded with messages warning against freezing water in plastic bottles or cooking with plastics in the microwave oven. These messages, frequently titled “Johns Hopkins Cancer News” or “Johns Hopkins Cancer Update,” are falsely attributed to Johns Hopkins and we do not endorse their content. Freezing water does not cause the release of chemicals from plastic bottles.

“Email Hoax Regarding Freezing Water Bottles and Microwave Cooking,” American Cancer Fund

In a short video, Dr. Joe Schwarcz, author of Brain Fuel: 199 Mind-Expanding Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life, explains some of these myths in more detail:

Even author Elizabeth Royte mentioned in an interview that this is a myth of grand proportions. (She is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.) Again, the folks at Johns Hopkins sat down with Dr. Rolf Haden, assistant professor at Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Center for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Haden dispelled the myth saying “This is an urban legend. There are no dioxins in plastics. In addition, freezing actually works against the release of chemicals.”

This myth perpetuates typically, but not always, from folks who like to shop at Whole Foods, believe in anthropogenic global warming, and want Bush brought up on war crimes. In other words, their science is as debased in critical thinking as their politics (I had to make this politically relevant… for this blog).

Updated info from BIG GOVERNMENT:

…Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

While environmentalists have always used their favorite tactic to “discredit” contrary information, their “go-to” arrow has been stolen from their quiver in the BPA fight.

To an environmentalist, the ability to attack the motives of those questioning their statements is their best weapon. Just look at Al Gore and the global warming/climate change debate. People dependent upon government grants to continue their studies find results that A) find results that are in line with those who publicize their “studies,” and B) will justify those grants and ensure the continued “need” for more. It’s almost as though crackheads got grants to study crack smoking and they miraculously get results that require more study. But since the end result of these studies is always the government getting more power to regulate people’s lives, it’s like the government is also a crack dealer and people trying to stop the cycle are the unwanted interventionists.

This circular dynamic was blown out of the water when a new study by the crack dealer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), found that BPA is harmless (see appendix for the WSJ article). While other large studies found the same thing, those were quickly attacked as being funded by “Big BPA” or some such nonsense. They’ve even helped expose the media bias inherent in these sorts of matters. But now the government itself has completed a large study, and duplicated the results in two separate labs , you’d think the fight would be over. It’s not.

The hardest thing to fight is dogma.

The ban bandwagon still rolls on, without even so much as a passing mention in the “news” stories about the new government findings…

(read more)

APPENDIX

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Postscript to a Panic | New findings about bisphenol-A (BPA) will not redeem it. (Aug. 3, 2011)

Postscript to a Panic: New findings about bisphenol-A (BPA) will not redeem it.

Even by the usual standards of the environmental movement, the panic over bisphenol-A (BPA) was remarkable for its detachment from reality. A new study funded by that well-known shill for big business known as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has now debunked this scare about as comprehensively as is possible.

BPA has been in use for five decades all over the world and has been tested extensively and found to be safe. In 2008, however, green campaigners, abetted by trial lawyers in the U.S., began touting the potential for BPA to “disrupt” hormones in the human body. BPA was implicated in everything from cancer to obesity to impotence. One particularly overheated campaigner compared letting babies drink from BPA-containing baby bottles to feeding infants birth-control pills. Canada banned its use in baby bottles, and several U.S. states did the same. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein tried to get it banned in the U.S. as well, despite a clean bill of health from the FDA.

Not everyone succumbed to the panic—for a while. Studies performed in Europe before the scare had begun concluded that, if anything, BPA was safer than previously believed. But last year, despite at least two opinions by the European Food Safety Agency that BPA was safe in plastic bottles and in the liners of food containers, the European Union moved to ban it as well.

Too bad they didn’t wait for the science. The most recent study, led by Justin Teeguarden at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and published in the journal Toxicological Studies, involved feeding subjects a BPA-rich diet for 24 hours. Researchers then monitored their blood and urine for traces of the dread chemical. The result was BPA levels too low to detect—and this, remember, was from eating the stuff, a veritable worst-case scenario. Scare-mongers will no doubt point out that these results don’t preclude terrible long-term consequences from the use of BPA in packaging. But the evidence suggests that not enough of it is even present in the body to cause that kind of harm.

The results of the study, which was duplicated in two separate government labs, may not change the fate of BPA in the court of public opinion. Nor will it help the likes of Sigg Switzerland USA, the U.S. distributor of those now-ubiquitous metal drinking bottles. Sigg was initially a beneficiary of the scare as people moved to ditch their plastic drinking bottles. But once it transpired that the lining of Sigg’s aluminum bottles manufactured before August 2008 also contained trace amounts of BPA, its U.S. distributor was hit with lawsuits and a campaign of public vilification that recently sent it into bankruptcy.

Lost amid the hysteria were the benefits of BPA, including the fact that it helped to eliminate botulism in canned food. Where does a chemical go to get its reputation back?

People who live off $2 a day cannot afford the $.50 to have their meager shacks lit up… not to mention the strain on the shoddy electrical grid. This simple invention that started in Brazil and worked its way around the world via the internet is bringing light and saving money for the poorest people in the world.

Read more at THE DAILY NEWS

Ford Lightning EV Truck Encapsulates Government Failure (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

… Failure Through Mandates, Penalties, And Subsidies

In Creating A False Supply/Demand Market

Based on An Industry Propped Up By The Same

One funny comment on the channel was this:

  • I’m sure everyone (except Ford) appreciates you demonstrating Lightning’s towing capacity.

Another good comment, based on the drop in performance* when these batteries are cold, is this:

  • Can’t wait to see winter and snow performance numbers on these.

*  CLIMATE/WEATHER IMPACT ON EVs

Another factor regarding optimal output and electric vehicles is hot and cold weather. I will let a wonderful WIRED MAGAZINE article explain:

…EV drivers have other factors to consider in winter weather: How far they can go, and how long it will take them to recharge.

Cold temperatures can hurt both, especially when it gets as severe as Winter Storm Jaden, which has triggered states of emergency across the country and will subject more than 70 percent of the US population to subzero temperatures over the next few days. That’s because the lithium-ion batteries that power EVs (as well as cellphones and laptops) are very temperature sensitive.

“Batteries are like humans,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, director of the University of Michigan’s Energy Institute. They prefer the same sort of temperature range that people do. Anything below 40 or above 115 degrees Fahrenheit and they’re not going to deliver their peak performance. They like to be around 60 to 80 degrees. As the temperature drops, the electrolyte fluid inside the battery cells becomes more sluggish. “You don’t have as much power when you want to discharge,” says Stefanopoulou. “The situation is even more limited when you want to charge.”

Modern cars are designed to take that into account, with battery thermal management systems that warm or cool a battery. But while an internal combustion engine generates its own heat, which warms the engine and the car occupants, an EV has to find that warmth somewhere else, either scavenging the small amount of heat that motors and inverters make or running a heater. That takes energy, meaning there’s less power available to move the wheels.

Additionally, to protect the battery—the most expensive component of an EV—the onboard computer may limit how it’s used in extreme low temperatures. The Tesla Model S owners manual warns: “In cold weather, some of the stored energy in the Battery may not be available on your drive because the battery is too cold.”…

Updated Video Comparison: Ev vs. Gas

How Far Can a Gas Truck & an Electric Ford Lightning Go Towing the Same Camper On ONE Fill-up?

Near the end the EV hauler says of the gas-powered Ford, “Even though he is burning dinosaurs” — um — so are you.

According to the study directed by Christoph Buchal of the University of Cologne, published by the Ifo Institute in Munich last week, electric vehicles have “significantly higher CO2 emissions than diesel cars.” That is due to the significant amount of energy used in the mining and processing of lithium, cobalt, and manganese, which are critical raw materials for the production of electric car batteries.

A battery pack for a Tesla Model 3 pollutes the climate with 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2. Each battery pack has a lifespan of approximately ten years and total mileage of 94,000, would mean 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometer (116 to 156 grams of CO2 per mile), Buchal said. Add to this the CO2 emissions of the electricity from powerplants that power such vehicles, and the actual Tesla emissions could be between 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometer (249 and 289 grams of CO2 per mile).

In a conversation between EV owners and others at WATTS UP WITH THAT, a comment that sums up the above but in a short paragraph, reads:

  • It’s not just bigger, it’s huge. Unlike an IC powered car, where cold weather won’t really affect it much, an electric car is severely disadvantaged. Drop outside temperatures down to -10 degrees F (not uncommon in Chicago) and that 300 mile range drops to 75 miles. Commute 20 miles to work on a frigid winter morning and 20 miles home in slooow traffic in a snowstorm with lights, wipers, and defroster on hi, and you just might not make it.

THE DAILY MAIL notes that “[e]lectric cars have 40 per cent less range when the temperature dips below freezing, new research has revealed.” Wow. Canadians are well-aware of the issue — as are the people in the northern states.

IN~OTHER~WORDS, this “venture is a giant boondoggle and these charging-stations would never survive outside of transferring wealth from business owners and those that drive the economy to cover this failure of a “choice.”

I was also “challenged” a bit, not really a challenged as much as a friendly observation — to which I just wish to record my response, as, it is a decent summation to the video regarding the review of the EV Ford Truck. My friend noted:

  • I think you’re tilting at windmills with this anti EV trend. The market should decide, and EV’s are getting really good. Can they replace a diesel f250? No, but for running around town they’re pretty damn good. I guess your issue is with government mandates.

After a somewhat silly response I continued with this:

On a more serious note, yes, pushing technology that does not work well at all in replacing fossil fuels as sound (solar, wind, current battery tech, etc.) through subsidies and edict… yes, THAT is the issue. This video highlights [encapsulates] the result of government largess IN THAT people have a false impression these vehicles are just as good and would in a free and open market fail. Europe is moving to make natural gas and nuclear “green,” because (a) they are, and (b) they work. The U.S. has the most corrupt and politicians that vote legislation based on a Utopian ideal (say, a Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc.) or personal enrichment (say McConnell or Pelosi, etc.). Reality bites and refuses to let go… even Newsom extended Diablo Canyon nuclear plant life instead of shutting it down. Why? because it works, wind and solar wanes at best…

It is an impossible goal, but many miss out on inculcating that fact into their thinking. Thomas Sowell notes the biggest difference between “conservatives” and “the Left” are these simple and basic questions:

1) compared to what?
2) at what cost?
3) what hard-evidence do you have?

Which even if someone were to read just my “BATTERY” section of my EV Post, they will encounter thinking unheard of in their normal diet of “clean energy” thinking. “At What Cost”

So, the “short answer” to my fellow compatriot on a similar life journey is, that that video shows the failure of what a large government “buying widgets” can do:

  • “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” — George Gilder

Via an Interview by Dennis Prager [EDITOR’S NOTE: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” no one needed in the real world (things made that it could not use, or people did not want based on what a politician or leader in a controlled environment “thought” people would need). This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program works. Only the free-market can do this: I-PENCIL]

Economics 101

Does Green Hydrogen Cause Brain Damage? (Robert Zubrin)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I am just gonna drop this right here:

…..Transatlantic shipments of Canadian green hydrogen do not exist (in the real world), because green hydrogen does not exist, and cannot exist. This is so because hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is a carrier of energy. It takes energy to make it. It is an alternative type of battery. To imagine that Germany can be powered with green hydrogen from Canada is somewhat like thinking that Germany can be powered with batteries charged up in Canada and then shipped across the ocean for discharge. (Although there is a significant difference in that batteries don’t need to be refrigerated to -253 Centigrade before shipment, and don’t evaporate along the way. We’ll come back to that part shortly.)

Nevertheless, within the Gedankenwelt there is a vision of green hydrogen, and it looks like this: While Canada’s significant real world nuclear and hydroelectric capacity are already spoken for, Canada can nevertheless use its abundant Gedankenwelt wind power resources to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. This hydrogen will then be liquified and shipped across the ocean to power Germany.

It should be noted that Germany has plenty of Gedankenwelt wind power resources itself, but for some reason most of the power it generates does not make it into the real world. Canada’s Gedankenwelt wind power might prove to have the same problem as well. But we’ll let that part go, because there is a bigger problem.

In the real world, hydrogen is not produced on a commercial scale by water electrolysis. It is certainly possible to do this, but it is much cheaper make hydrogen by steam reforming methane, (natural gas) into carbon dioxide and hydrogen. (The chemical equation for this is CH4 + H2O + 1/2O2 => CO2 + 3H2.) You then need to separate the hydrogen from the CO2 to get pure hydrogen that you can ship. That takes energy, as does the production of the oxygen used in the steam reformation process itself. Still more energy is lost because while the net energy content of the three hydrogen molecules produced by steam reformation is about 90 percent that of the single methane molecule that was used to make them, they are much harder to ship. While using refrigeration equipment capable of achieve ideal (Carnot cycle) efficiency it would take about triple the power to liquefy the hydrogen as the original methane, using real world equipment it would take at least ten times the power, with the process consuming about half the energy the hydrogen contains. The refrigeration equipment would also be far more expensive than that used to liquify natural gas into LNG, as it must achieve temperatures of -253 Centigrade (20 K), instead of the -165 Centigrade (108 K) needed to liquefy natural gas.

The required hydrogen tankers would not only have to be higher tech than current LNG tankers, but much bigger as well. Liquid methane has six times the density of liquid hydrogen, while hydrogen only has 2.4 times the energy per unit mass. As a result, it takes a tanker 2.5 times as big to transport the same about as energy shipping liquid hydrogen as it does shipping LNG. These tankers will use a lot of oil. To make matters worse, about three times as much hydrogen (by energy content) as LNG would boil off along the way.

It is precisely the overheads of liquefaction and tanker shipping that typically drive LNG costs to be a factor of five times or more that of pipeline natural gas. (Current US pipeline price is $9/thousand cubic feet; price of LNG delivered to Europe is now $74/thousand cubic feet.). That’s bad enough. But these same overheads for hydrogen will be at least ten times greater.

Assuming anyone is willing to pay such enormous prices, once the hydrogen gets to Europe there will be further problems. To be used, the hydrogen will have to be regasifed and transmitted to the point of use by pipeline. But hydrogen gas contains less a third the energy content per unit volume as natural gas. So the cross sectional area of gas pipeline systems will need to be tripled. Also, any vehicles running on compressed natural gas will have to triple the size of their already oversized tanks to maintain the same range using the new, inferior, but vastly overpriced fuel.

The bottom line is that transatlantic hydrogen shipments will not only cost at least ten times as much as LNG, but result in triple the CO2 emissions per unit power as well……

Environmentalist Doomsday Predictions

Published by Papa Giorgio

All fails BTW (SLAY NEWS):

  1. “‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” —The New York Times, 1969.
  2. “No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” —Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.
  3. “Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’” —The Boston Globe, 1970.
  4. “The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’—‘five to 10,’ he estimated—‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’” —Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.
  5. “Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” —Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.
  6. “However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.” – Time Magazine, 1974.
  7. “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 [degrees] F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” —Time magazine, 1974.
  8. “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” —Associated Press, 1989.
  9. “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” —former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
  10. “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 2019.

Marie Antoinette Democrats: Let Them Drive EVs

Published by Papa Giorgio

(WESTERN JOURNAL HAS MORE)

This was floating around Facebook, But I wanted to get something a tiny bit more substantial than FB. To wit: THE VERMONT DAILY CHRONICLE:

Tesla said it best in referring to batteries as an Energy Storage System. They do NOT make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an electric vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle…not. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are in fact coal-powered…let that sink in.

Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single use. The most common single use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, they will continue to leak like the ooze in a ruined flashlight. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about these is that ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not the half of it. For those excited about EV, a closer look at batteries along with windmills and solar panels is highly recommended. These three technologies share environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it: embedded costs and operating costs. Embedded costs are those that happen before point of sale such as fuel costs, equipment, labor, transportation, etc. For example, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. 

Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. This should concern you. All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. 

All told, it would take 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material.

Despite the fact California is the only state which requires batteries be recycled, they are building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco which they intend to power from solar panels and windmills. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. 

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride which are highly toxic. Also, silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last only 15 to 20 years. The used blades cannot be recycled. And sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but looking beyond the myth of zero emissions, it is predicted EVs, solar panels and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become more apparent. 

This is always a favorite of mine… and remember, I have a rather large post detailing ARE ELECTRIC CARS “CLEAN”?.

A Previous Post

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Delusional Democrats Pipe-Dreams About Renewable Energy | Larry Elder

Published by Papa Giorgio

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

The Free Market vs. Nationalization In Protecting the Environment

Published by Papa Giorgio

(See PRAGER U’s PLAYLIST) Here is an excerpt that the above video compliments.

It is a hallmark of socialist governments everywhere to nationalize heavy industries like petroleum, and, in the process, turn them into government-supervised environmental criminals unaccountable to property owners and consumers. For example, when privately owned British Petroleum (BP) caused an accidental oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it immediately established a $20 billion fund to pay future claims of damages and did everything it could to clean up the mess. It had legal obligations and its corporate reputation at stake. When the Mexican government’s oil company, Pemex, causes an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—and there have been many—it claims “sovereign immunity” from any legal damages. In the first five months of 2015, Pemex was responsible for three catastrophic oil rig explosions in the Gulf of Mexico that caused several deaths, numerous injuries to oil platform workers, and generated air and water pollution. Pemex claimed that the explosions caused no oil spill, but satellite images taken by Greenpeace Mexico showed a two-and-a-half-mile long oil slick reaching from the exploded oil platform. “Pemex has proven time and time again that you cannot trust their statements,” said Gustavo Ampugnani of Greenpeace Mexico.

The United States is not immune from socialist-d riven environmental problems. Many utility compa­nies, for example, are government-owned with less than stellar results. In 2015, to take just one recent example, the people of Flint, Michigan, were alerted to a fright-cuing environmental debacle. The city government, supposedly in an effort to save money, switched its city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, despite the fact that the Flint River had long been known to be extraordinarily polluted. The Flint city government (and the state’s Department of Environ­mental Quality, according to a class action lawsuit) failed to properly treat water from the Flint River. The result was that city residents drank and bathed in water full of lead and other dangerous chemicals.

For many intellectuals, the attraction of socialism is that it is “rational”; it is a “planned” economy, planned by people like them. In reality, the environ­mental and economic results of socialism are a litany of disaster.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (New Jersey, NJ: Regnery, 2016), 120-121.

Ban Everything | 2020 Democrat Platform (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

GATEWAY PUNDIT noted: …CNN hosted a seven-hour climate hysteria event on Wednesday and Democrats went hog wild. By the end, they’d called for bans on plastic straws, red meat (especially cheeseburgers), incandescent lightbulbs, gas-powered cars, airplanes. They also want an end to fossil fuels, oil drilling, fracking, natural gas exploration and coal plants, along with nuclear energy.

Adapted a bit from LOUDER with CROWDER:

ONE: culling the population of undesirables (the poor) through genocide.

[….]

TWO: Deciding what we can and cannot EAT!

“My body, my choice” my ass. Now you’re telling us what we can and cannot consume.

Kamala says she wants to “ban certain behaviors.” Not like killing your baby. No that’s fine. Especially if it’s some poor brown baby. But eating cheeseburgers or meat at all, that’s verboten.

Oh sure, Kamala is talking about reconstituting the food pyramid and “incentivizing” certain behaviors. But let’s play this out. Take a cheeseburger and treat it like cigarettes, which have a “sin” tax to de-incentivize smoking. The sin is just eating that which tastes good….

[….]

FOUR: Banning things we use, as small as a plastic straw to as large as our gasoline-powered cars….

Almost all the candidates want to stop oil, gas, and coal selling/production. Gas powered cars will be a thing of the past — almost immediately — if they get their way.

DAILY CALLER video

GRABIAN video

I updated a post showing the impossibility of Trump being a “Russian Asset” as the MSM and Democrats said for almost 3-years. Here is the updated portion:

…when oil prices rise above $60-$65 a barrel… fracking increases supply, serving as an effective cap on energy prices. (Broadly speaking, the same principle is true of natural gas prices.) Putin’s government revenue and foreign policy are dependent on high crude prices and foreign nations buying their crude from Russia. Lower prices due to U.S. or other nations’ competition cost him a lot of money, and put the Russian economy and his public support at risk. Even more importantly, it deprives him of the tool of energy blackmail, which he has used to extort other countries into adopting Kremlin-friendly foreign policy choices. This is why Russian intelligence services have been so active in supporting western environmental groups and other interests opposed to fracking. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER — in other words, our energy policy, under Trump, is anti-Putin. By contrast, ALL of the Democratic 2020 candidates energy policies will enrich Putin.)

WATTS UP WITH THAT has a linked DAILY CALLER article that highlights 7-BANS by the candidates:

1: Biden Applauds The Green New Deal

“I think the Green New Deal deserves an enormous amount of credit,” former Vice President Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper before listing off what he considers to be the problems with the much-criticized idea to stop global warming.

He noted that “85 percent of the problem” (climate change) is coming from the rest of the world.

2. Harris Says She Would Ding The Filibuster To Implement The GND

“If [Republicans] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” Sen. Kamala Harris of California said to audience applause.

Harris said Republicans should “look in the mirror and ask themselves why they failed to act,” calling the fight for the GND one “against powerful interests.” Democrats would need to win Senate control along with the presidency to have any hope of ending the longstanding tradition.

3. Yang Won’t Talk About Electric Cars

Yang skirted questions about whether every American will need to drive electric cars in the future. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Yang why he would promise federal funds for “potentially risky” and experimental means of energy production.

“We’re here together because we can. This is a crisis. In a crisis, all solutions have to be on the table. If you were attacking on one side, you should be researching various alternatives on the other side. That to me is just responsible management and responsible leadership,” Yang explained.

4. Sanders’ One Word Answer To A Question About Light Bulbs

“The Trump administration announced plans to overturn requirements on energy-saving lightbulbs. … Would you reinstate those requirements?” CNN’s Cooper asked Sanders, who has described himself as a self-avowed democratic socialist.

The Vermont senator answered with one word: “Duh.” Sanders’ comment came several hours after the Trump administration announced new rules Wednesday rolling back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs.

(Read it all at WUWT)

See some more articles:

Does Honey-Nut Cheerios Cause Cancer?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Glenn Beck and his crew hilariously explain just how many bowls of Cheerios you would have to eat each day for 80-years to get a chance at contracting cancer. Another Leftist scare down in flames. But remember, Monsanto is the BIG BAD whipping boy of the eco-fascists.

ASSUMED TRUE: The following is taking the study at face value – as if it were true. Remember, the people that presented this study did not have their work peer-reviewed, nor did they release or make public their criteria to say how they reached their numbers. But let’s assume they are correct. ANOTHER NOTE: By merely saying “glyphosate,” or putting the word, “Monsanto,” as a descriptor/company name in front of the stated concern… does not make-magically a statement true. We are thinking individuals. JURY AWARDED: Remember, a jury awarded a guy money for a supposed connection to “Round-Up” (glyphosate). A jury in [*megaphone FX with a thundering echo] SAN FRANCISCO saw a “connection.” Maybe, just maybe, they were biased in their view? It is San Francisco after-all. It is like saying just because a jury said O.J. Simpson was not guilty, therefore, he didn’t murder two people in a fit of selfish psychotic rage.

California’s standard is 1.1 milligrams of “Round-Up” to be consumed (say, in cereal) to be safe. Which means you would have to eat 80 bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios a day… for 80-years… to MAYBE have cancer caused by this consumption. I say MAYBE because then you would have about a 1-in-10,000 person that genetics may be susceptible to “Round-Up.” So, a single person out of 10,000 people MAY have an ill-affect from consuming that amount (California standard is 1.1 milligrams) a day… for 80-years

But wait, that 1.1 milligrams was for a child consuming glyphosate. We grow up and become ADULTS (some of us at least). An ADULT would have to consume 2.4 million bowls a day for 80-years to have the 1-in-10,000 chance of cancer.

Why Can’t America Fill a Pothole?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Why can’t America build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia? Why are our bridges, roads, and airports not what they should be? Aren’t we the richest and most technologically savvy country in the world? Who or what is holding us back? Kyle Smith of National Review has the surprising (and frustrating) answer.

Plastic Straws Banned in Santa Barbara (Origins Update)

Published by Papa Giorgio

In light of the moonbat jihad against drinking straws (see here, here, and here) having reached the point that providing customers with straws is now punishable with jail time in Santa Barbara, see if you can guess whether this is a legitimate story or fake news from the Babylon Bee…. (MOONBATTERY)

MOONBATTERY has more on the origin of this “500-million” number:

You may have heard that Starbucks — ever at the vanguard of moonbattery — has proclaimed that it will eliminate all single-use plastic straws by 2020. You may also have heard that the lids it will use that allow drinking without a straw require more plastic than if they just stuck with the straws. You may be aware that the liberal jihad against plastic straws is reaching critical mass:

In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris to Tom Brady have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic and The Atlantic have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice is now treating their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.

But did you know that the anti-straw jihad is the brainchild of a little kid?

It began with a 9-year-old boy named Milo Cress and his 2011 campaign, “Be Straw Free,” which launched to raise awareness about plastic waste.

His big finding? Americans use more than 500 million drinking straws daily, enough to fill 125 school buses. That figure has become highly touted since, referenced in straw ban coverage from The New York Times and National Geographic to reports from the National Park Service (and USA TODAY).

Young Milo came up with the outlandishly improbable 500 million straws per day stat himself. Adult moonbats ran with it…..

The Climate Is Changing At Catholic Seminaries

Published by Papa Giorgio

Pope Francis is the only pope in history to explicitly intervene in an American presidential election—and while the pontiff’s goal is evidently to attract Millennials, record numbers of young people mistrust the Catholic Church.

As a Catholic, I honor the Church’s history of furthering the advancement of human knowledge. Yet Pope Francis makes the mistake of embracing the fake science of man-made climate alarmism—while pontificating to you and me about “fake news.”

As the world’s most powerful religious leader, the Pope is in a unique position of influence. Which is why I entreat Pope Francis to refrain from interjecting himself into American politics until he is willing to engage in careful scientific research and verbal articulation.

“The media misinterprets the Pope!” is the common excuse Catholics give for the illogical and uncharitable-sounding remarks that Pope Francis routinely makes in public. I’ve given the Pope time to improve, and even ardently defended him against the media early on….

(TOWNHALL)

Dennis Prager touches on the issue of culture influencing religion more that the other way around. In this case, Catholic Priests going through seminary will have to be taught about “climate change.” Mind you, the Catholic Church is a prime example of a corporate body accepting disproved or outdated “scientific” paradigms… take for example:

➤ What were Galileo Galilei’s conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church? It was not a simple conflict between science and religion, as usually portrayed. Rather it was a conflict between Copernican science and Aristotelian science which had become Church tradition. Galileo expressed his scientific views supporting Copernicus as well as his biblical views in a 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany which became the basis of his first Church trial and censure. A major work published in 1632 resulted in Galileo’s conviction on suspicion of heresy and a lifetime house arrest. The Galileo affair provides important lessons and applications to the Church and to science today. (http://tinyurl.com/zb4ezzk)

Here are some articles on the topic Dennis is discussing – above:

Here is the leftist-Catholic article he was referencing: New priests to learn about global warming as part of formation