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Worries About ‘Existential Threat’ From Climate Change Suddenly Put On Hold For Paris Olympics

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6 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

 

The U.S. Olympic team will be supplied with room air conditioning units, joining other countries like Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and Italy.

Organizers of the Summer Olympics Games to be held in Paris next month were hoping to force the games to be held sans air conditioning — what a wonderful virtue signal that would send to the climate-alarmed public!

The plan, as USA Today reported, was to force all event venues and athlete housing units to rely on a geothermal cooling system devised by the French. But, you know, it can get hot in Paris in the summer, and participating athletes and countries had some concerns about it.

So, despite the grand, centrally planned net-zero initiatives financed by trillions of debt-funded dollars and euros and pounds, many countries are planning to keep their athletes calm, collected and properly cooled with electricity-hogging room a/c units.

Note that the list of countries above includes some that are led by the world’s most aggressive and notorious climate scolds.

German leaders in this century have succeeded in largely destroying what had been the industrial powerhouse of Europe at the altar of climate alarmism, investing billions of debt-funded euros in a Quixotic attempt to power their society with windmills. That plan has been so successful to date that last winter, in a desperate attempt to avoid power blackouts, the government there resorted to reactivating mothballed coal plants and tore down a wind development to expand a domestic coal mining operation.

In the UK, the Tories — ostensibly the “conservatives” in Britain — now face an electoral wipeout of unprecedented proportions due in part to their buying whole hog into climate alarmist dogma.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose public approval rating would make President Joe Biden blush, faces a similar fate for similar reasons in national elections that will take place in 2025.

The governments of Australia and New Zealand, in nominally “conservative” or “liberal” regimes alike, have also embarked well down the net-zero path to deindustrialization.

Yet every one of these countries will be shipping out hundreds of energy consuming, greenhouse-gas-emitting air conditioners to Paris.

No national government has invested more time and more debt-funded dollars in virtue signaling and lecturing the public about climate change in recent years than the Biden regime. To hear President Joe Biden Biden, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Climate Envoy John Podesta, former Climate Envoy John Kerry and Vice President Kamala Harris tell it, a 1.5-degree rise in temperature is in fact an “existential threat,” one that requires us to saddle our great-grandchildren with trillions of more dollars in unsustainable debt to address right now, or — wait for it — we will all die!

But hey, we can’t have our Olympic athletes suffering in rooms where the Paris geothermal cooling system might only get temperatures down to an unbearable 78 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is imperative that the United States join the room a/c caravan across the Pond to gay Paree.

That is basically what USA Today quotes U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland as saying: “We have great respect for the work that’s been done by the Paris organizing committee in particular and their focus on sustainability,” Hirshland said. “As you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USA’s performance. In our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.”

But wait: If climate change is truly an existential threat to all mankind, shouldn’t the desires of a few thousand Olympics athletes to stay cool in their rooms simply be ignored? For the “greater good” and all that stuff?

After all, that is what the central governments in every one of these countries do whenever public opinion disapproves of their policy choices. Why should this become an exception?

The global religious belief that mankind can control the climate like it has a thermostat we can turn up and down at will is an example of unbridled hubris that is unrivalled in human history. That hubris is only exceeded by the rank hypocrisy practiced by the loudest and most visible of the religion’s adherents.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS)

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conflict

The West Is Playing With Fire In Ukraine

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National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Morgan Murphy

As wars tend to do, the battle over Ukraine continues to escalate.

It was reported this week that North Korean soldiers in the conflict total 10,000 thus far and that Russia has rewarded Pyongyang by sending its excellent air defense systems to the Korean Peninsula in exchange.

Last month, the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, warned that any North Korean troops fighting in the conflict would be, “fair game and fair targets.”

His green light delivered this week when “a high-ranking North Korean military officer [became] a casualty” according to a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday. That strike was allegedly conducted with British Storm Shadow missiles.

Just these recent events further entangle the U.S., U.K., North Korea, South Korea, and China within the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

But the week’s biggest Ukraine news rattled many Americans — the Biden administration authorized Ukraine to strike targets within Russia with the American-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS).

“The missiles will speak for themselves,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy boasted.

They sure will. First of all, the U.S. doesn’t have many of the $1.3 million missiles to lob around. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo warned an audience at the Brookings Institute this week that the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are “now eating into stocks … and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”

I’ve met and been briefed by Admiral Paparo, who is one of the most positive and straight-talking flag officers in our military. If he is publicly ringing the warning bell, U.S. policy leaders should take heed.

Putin did not take the news of the ATACMS well. In response, he announced the use of a hypersonic ballistic missile on Thursday, carefully noting that it didn’t carry a nuclear warhead. The unspoken part: next time, it might.

What’s the goal in Biden’s escalation? It seems the White House is trying to prevent the inevitable or blame Trump for Ukraine’s upcoming defeat.

What they won’t admit is that the metrics of the war are not in Ukraine’s favor, and frankly never have been. No supersonic missile will change the immutable: Russia boasts a population five times Ukraine’s and when it comes to war materiel, Russia is winning. Despite Biden’s attempt to hobble the Russian economy, Putin’s war industry is outproducing the West by three times in the basic munitions needed to prosecute a land battle.

But aren’t Russians dying en mass on the battlefield?

Western leaders keep touting Russia’s high death toll, which estimates now place at 600,000. To military strategists here in the United States, such a human cost is unimaginable. Add up every American combat death going back 160 years through the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, and even the Union combat deaths in the Civil War, and the number does’t reach what Russia has lost in the past 1,000 days.

American and NATO leaders are foolish to underestimate Russian resolve.

Since its initial blundering and poorly-executed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has recovered from its mistakes, Russian public support for the war remains high, and the Russian economy hasn’t fallen apart. Putin may have lost the virtue-signaling battle of Ukrainian flag lapel pins, but make no mistake: he’s on a path to win the war.

Biden’s deputy Pentagon press secretary, Sabrina Singh, says don’t worry. On Thursday she told reporters the administration was sending as much American weapons and support to Ukraine as it can muster, “in the weeks and months ahead left of this administration. So, that’s what we’re really focused on.”

What did she make of Putin’s nuclear threat?  “I mean, you know, we’ve seen this type of, you know, dangerous, reckless rhetoric before from President Putin,” Singh said.

“I mean, you know?” No, we don’t know. The world hasn’t seen nuclear threats like this since Harry S. Truman demanded Japan surrender.

For anyone worried about the state of our national security, January 20th can’t come quickly enough.

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Taxpayer watchdog calls Trudeau ‘out of touch’ for prioritizing ‘climate change’ while families struggle

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The prime minister told a G20 panel this week that fighting so-called ‘climate change’ should be more important to families than putting food on the table or paying rent.

Canada’s leading taxpayer watchdog blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for being completely “out of touch” with everyday Canadians after the PM earlier this week suggested his climate “change” policies, including a punitive carbon tax, are more important for families than trying to stay financially afloat.

In speaking to LifeSiteNews, Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) federal director Franco Terrazzano said Trudeau’s recent comments show his government “continues to prove it’s out of touch with its carbon tax.”

“Canadians don’t support the carbon tax because we know it makes life more expensive and it doesn’t help the environment,” Terrazzano told LifeSiteNews.

Terrazzano’s comments come after Trudeau told a G20 panel earlier this week that fighting so-called “climate change” should be more important to families than putting food on the table or paying rent.

Speaking to the panel, Trudeau commented that it is “really, really easy” to “put climate change as a slightly lower priority” when one has “to be able to pay the rent this month” or “buy groceries” for their “kids,” but insisted that “we can’t do that around climate change.”

Terrazzano said that the Trudeau government’s carbon tax in reality “impacts nearly all aspects of life in Canada by making it more expensive to fuel up our cars, heat our homes and buy food.”

“The carbon tax also puts a huge hole in our economy that we can’t afford,” he said to LifeSiteNews, adding that if Trudeau really wanted to help Canadians and “prove it understands the struggles facing Canadians,” then it should “scrap the carbon tax to make life more affordable.”

On Thursday, Trudeau, who is facing abysmal polling numbers, announced he would introduce a temporary pause on the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) for some goods.

Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre this afternoon said about Trudeau’s temporary tax holiday that if he is serious about helping Canadians, he would cut the carbon tax completely.

“What a ridiculous gimmick. Bribing Canadians temporarily with borrowed money,” Bernier wrote.

“When the real solution is to stop growing the bureaucracy, cut wasteful spending, stop sending billions to Ukraine, eliminate subsidies to businesses and activist groups, stop creating new unsustainable and unconstitutional social programs, eliminate the deficit, and THEN, cut taxes for real. None of which he will do of course.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, a survey found that nearly half of Canadians are just $200 away from financial ruin as the costs of housing, food and other necessities has gone up massively since Trudeau took power in 2015.

In addition to the increasing domestic carbon tax, LifeSiteNews reported last week that Minister of Environment Steven Guilbeault wants to create a new “global’ carbon tax applied to all goods shipped internationally that could further drive-up prices for families already struggling with inflated costs.

Not only is the carbon tax costing Canadian families hundreds of dollars annually, but Liberals also have admitted that the tax has only reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 1 percent.

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