Politics
Worries About ‘Existential Threat’ From Climate Change Suddenly Put On Hold For Paris Olympics
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
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)
For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory and DEI.
This is a historic moment. For the past five years, I have been fighting to defeat critical race theory, gender cultism, and DEI. Now, President Trump has taken decisive action and instructed his administration to rip out these malicious ideologies root and branch, not just from the federal government but from all institutions that receive federal funding—universities, schools, corporations. All of it.
It has been a long road. The Left will try to memory-hole the recent past, but we must not forget a simple historical truth: the Left put America through a reign of terror after 2020. I have long hesitated to tell my personal story—I did not want to give my enemies the satisfaction—but now it’s time to lay out the facts. This is some of what the Left’s activists did to me and my family as they sought to intimidate me and shut me up.
When I lived in Seattle, they put up posters around my neighborhood with my home address, telling insane lies about me and instructing activists to show up at my door. Later, they sent letters to a few hundred of my neighbors, claiming I was a Nazi white supremacist. Death threats, references to my family, the whole deal. A few times, we had to pack up the kids and leave town.
One of these activists found one of my children at a park with the babysitter and yelled at him until he started crying. My son came home terrified. I figured out who this person was—a software developer who lived in the neighborhood—got his number, called him, delivered some “persuasive” words, and forced him to apologize to my son over the phone. I made sure he was much more frightened than my son had been.
Leftist activists organized employees within Microsoft to email-bomb my wife’s boss, claiming that she was a white supremacist. Thankfully, he thought it strange for her to be an Asian white supremacist and knew it was all a fabrication. I tracked down the ringleader and, “coincidentally,” he was fired a few months later. He overestimated his position and underestimated mine.
Then there were the calls and texts to our private numbers. Threats to rape my wife and murder my children. At one point, I reached out to the FBI about it, but the perpetrators had used number-cloaking apps and there was nothing law enforcement could do. I thought we had a lead in St. Louis and hired a private investigator to look into it, but the trail went cold. We fortified our home and studied up on the law. I was prepared to kill anyone who crossed the threshold to harm my family.
The institutions got in on it, too: organized campaigns to ruin my reputation, manipulate my Wikipedia page, cancel my speaking engagements, and list me on the websites of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, in an attempt to get me banned from social media. The censorship apparatus put a target on my back, and the federal government egged it on. They all failed.
My experience is hardly unique. Many other conservatives have faced similar circumstances. Yes, our fight has been about CRT, DEI, and other ideological issues—but more than anything, it has been about safeguarding America’s free society from threats, violence, intimidation, and madness. That is why I fight. And, by the grace of God, why we are winning.
I have been able to continue this work, in part, because of my readers on Substack, who have provided an independent source of income for us. This is high-risk, high-reward work and my readers make it all possible. If you’re able, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber now.
National
Doug Ford is calling an election to save his political skin and Justin Trudeau’s government
Ford is the ultimate Red Tory, a faux conservative and faithful apologist for Trudeau
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has just called an election for two reasons: to keep himself in power and to keep the Liberal Party in charge of the Canadian government. Ford has been in the pocket of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for so many years. He has been his constant political companion, especially during the Covid pandemic when Ford stood rigidly by Trudeau over lockdowns and mandates. When Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to flatten the Freedom Convoy, Ford was there all the time, not just approving of Trudeau’s decision but becoming an active cheerleader for the Liberal government.
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Ford has done little to nothing for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada because he’s not a Conservative or a small-c conservative. Ford is a “Progressive Conservative” or Red Tory who is indistinguishable from a Liberal. His party’s name is an oxymoron but Ford is just a moron who pretends to lead something called the Ford Nation, feigning some degree of populism, while all the while serving the same elites that Trudeau is in bed with.
Ford has done his utmost to convice us that the Liberals have a border security plan. They do not. Spending $1.3 billion on the border OVER SIX YEARS is not a plan, it’s a poor excuse for policly. And just look at how the Trudeau government preserves these woke programs even as it kicks the can of border security way down the road. But Ford, who seemed to be pretending that he had actually seen this “plan” tried to suggest that the Liberals had the situation well in hand.
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“Minister [Dominic] LeBlanc laid out the plan. It’s a fabulous plan. Let’s get out there and tell the people of Canada they’ve worked hard on it. So what I said this morning after seeing the plan, it’s a solid plan, and it’s going to work,” he said, noting that Public Safety Minister David McGuinty was coordinating everything with all the relevant agencies and police forces.
“It’s a collective, collaborative group that are going to secure our borders. But the numbers that I have seen, it’s impressive, and the plan is impressive as well. Specifics about what this plan involves, I’ll leave that up to the federal government. I’ll leave, leave that up to Minister McGuinty to get out there and put the plan in front of the Canadian people. But it’s a solid plan,” Ford rambled on, adding that he had never even met McGuinty and “I wouldn’t know him if he walked through the door right now.”
The current tariff crisis with US President Donald Trump is all about Canada not securing its border and not doing anything to change that posture. Ford has been Trudeau’s echo since Trump first threatened to slap on the tariff, joined at the hip with him, supporting his Team Canada charade that is really Team Trudeau and welcoming a trade war with Trump. The Liberals, whether they go into the next election with Trudeau at the helm or not, don’t want to run against Poilievre and the Conservatives because they are 20 to 30 points behind in the polls. They want the next federal election to be against Trump because the only hope the Liberals have of winning is to pretend to be the party of Canada.
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This works well for Ford as well. He can parade around as the politician who puts his country above self but that is precisely what he is not doing. Ford wants a provincial election now because there is some profoundly bad news in the offing for Ford and his corrupt government. Trudeau has co-opted Ford on his electric vehicle agenda that has squandered $52.5 billion in taxpayer money and ensured that the premier stood by his side every time he was announcing another EV manufacturing plant in the Ontario. The future of EVs looked pretty certain six months ago when the Green New Deal was ascendant in the US and it looked like the gas-powered vehicle was slated for the planned obsolescence of stupid government decrees and environmental extremism.
The Liberals, whether they go into the next election with Trudeau at the helm or not, don’t want to run against Poilievre and the Conservatives because they are 20 to 30 points behind in the polls. They want the next federal election to be against Trump because the only hope the Liberals have of winning is to pretend to be the party of Canada.
Not so today. Trump has changed all of that with the stroke of a pen, ending all EV mandates and removing any future sanctions of the internal combustion engine in an executive order. EVs are essentially finished for now and no one is buying them. There is no market for the cars being assembled in Windsor and St. Thomas. These plants are destined for failure. That’s why Ford has to move now, before the closures begin and before the unemployment begins. Ontario will also be facing an economic catastrophe from Trump’s 25 percent tariff and all of Ford’s bluster and BS will have done nothing to prevent it. If Ford does not seek reelection now, his chances of winning another mandate will be extremely low.
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What really has Ford panicked is Trump’s talk about not needing to buy any cars made in Canada. That sounds like the dissolution of the Auto Pact that has been a mainstay of the Ontario economy for 60 years.
But of course, he is also helping Trudeau to avoid an early election and the Liberals could well campaign in the summer or fall as the anti-Trump party. The Conservatives could be almost irrelevant by that time if they can’t differentiate themselves from the Liberals and demand that voters go to the polls to elect a legitimate government that can negotiate with the US instead of remaining with a snide, insouciant prime minister who continues to ignore the border security that the Trump has insisted we deliver on while continuing to fire insults his way.
Currently, the only Canadian politician who is really working for Canada is Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who is actively negotiating with Trump. Unfortunately, Trump apparently doesn’t even know that Poilievre exists and is continues to talk about hockey great Wayne Gretzky becoming the next prime minister. Poilievre needs to correct this misunderstanding immediately, start traveling with Smith to Washington if necessary. But he has to become a part of the process and stop letting Trudeau and Ford blather on about retaliatory tariffs and the punishment they think they are going to administer to the US.
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