Climate Change
Man-made climate change due to the "pollutant" carbon dioxide (CO2) will destroy civilization! We must take drastic measures to save the planet now! This has been the multi-decade international campaign of some scientists, Hollywood types, leftist politicians and the media, popularized by the 2006 documentary film with Al Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth". The upcoming 5th Assessment report [AR5] of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is being trumpeted as further proof (they are now 95% sure of man-made global warming). The Gray Area actually believes that humans are doing harm to the environment, but the facts don't support that climate change is affected by humans. This is not just from the 2009 "climategate" scandal, but a growing number of scientists also agree. This will come as heresy to the leftists who have built their belief systems or careers on this campaign, but it is nonetheless true - facts don't support the claim. The Global Warming Primer, Second Edition, by the NCPA provides counterpoints to the film's message. "The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today." The Earth has had cyclical weather patterns since its creation. Ice sheets covered and retreated around the globe four times. We are currently in the 5th warming cycle over the last 400,000 years, and it is the least severe, according to "The Big Picture" at www.climate4you.com. There is scientific data ad-nausea-um on the subject of climate change at that site. So why the high volume messaging that man-made climate change exists - follow the money and the political advantage that comes from it. Government funding for academic research, growth of government bureaucracies, excuse for raising taxes, tax payer funded subsidies and a big lure for charitable donations. So, as you read the left and right positions on climate change below, remember, the truth is "petroleum saved the whales", "coal saved the forests" and "wealthier is healthier".
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How the Gas Stove in Your Kitchen Became a Symbol of Freedom

1/16/23
from The Wall Street Journal,
1/16/23:

The left framed its latest crusade as a ‘right-wing culture war.’ We’ve seen this pattern many times.

The Great Gas Stove Rebellion of 2023 probably won’t resonate with future generations of freedom-loving folk the way the Boston Tea Party does. It’s unlikely that the plucky protagonists in the struggle to save our ovens and ranges from the grasping hands of regulatory totalitarianism will one day be celebrated as the Samuel Adamses and Patrick Henrys of the kitchen appliance age.

Still, the little victory secured last week over the forces of progressive technocratic authoritarianism is significant in its way—even if it may prove only provisional and someday in a bleak, electrified future, our Vikings and Kenmores are eventually prised from our cold, dead hands.

The small triumph chalked up for common sense and normality is so rare these days it’s worth celebrating in itself. It’s also a useful reminder that the inexorable march of government mandates, the endless effort by our rulers to enforce their “scientifically” unchallengeable dogma on what they see as a population of ignorant drudges, can be resisted.

More than that, the way the episode played out last week has been an instructive exercise in how modern society advances, how the ascendant left is the locomotive force behind our culture and politics.

As conservatives—and, much of the apolitical public—began to raise their voices against Commissar Richard Trumka Jr.’s diktat declaring war on gas stoves, the media took up the familiar narrative. “How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars” explained Time Magazine. An unelected official proposes some indefensible new regulation in the name of “science” that materially and adversely affects the lives of tens of millions of Americans—and it is somehow another front opened by the “right wing” in their “culture wars.”

It happens all the time.

It happened with same-sex marriage, the idea that sex is independent of biology, the proposition that all white people are racist, the assertion that the planet is burning. All started out as intellectual hobbyhorses of the left fringe and quickly wound up being examples of the “far right” trying to impose its will.

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