“We’re A Group Of 12-Year-Olds Trying To Make A Difference” – 1992 UN Climate Crisis Redux
Nearly 30 years before angry 16-year-old girl Greta Thunberg “shamed” world leaders in a tearful tirade at The UN, a 12-year-old girl “silenced the world for five minutes”.
In 1992, Severn Cullis-Suzuki – then 12-year-old daughter of Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, addressed the plenary session of the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
In it, she described being “afraid to breathe the air” or go out in the sun, warned of mass extinctions of plants and animals and urged rich nations to stop spending so much money on war and “let go of some of our wealth”.
Sound familiar? It Should:
I just dug up this clip from 1992…
Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s speech to the UN in 1992 on climate change sounds an awful lot like Greta Thunberg’s in 2019.
“We are a group of 12 and 13-year-olds trying to make a difference. We’ve raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come 5000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.
“Coming up here today I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come. I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go.
“I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the hole in our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don’t know what chemicals are in it. I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad, until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct. Every day, vanishing forever.
“In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies. But now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see. Did you have to worry of these things when you were my age? All of this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions.
“I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realise neither do you. You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer, you don’t how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream, you don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct, and you can’t bring back the forest that once grew where there is now a desert. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.
“Here, you may be delegates of your governments, businesspeople, organisers, reporters or politicians, but really, you’re mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, and all of you are someone’s child. I am only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong. In fact, 30 million species strong. And borders and governments will never change that.
“I am only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal. In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel. In my country we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, buy and throw away and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to let go of some of our wealth.
“In Canada, we live the privileged life with plenty of food, water and shelter. We have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets, the list could go on for two days. Two days ago here in Brazil we were shocked when we spent time with some children living on the streets. This is what one child told us: ‘I wish I was rich. And if I were I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicines, shelter, and love and affection.’ If a child on the streets who has nothing is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy?
“I can’t stop thinking that these are children my own age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the favelas of Rio, I could be a child starving in Somalia or a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India. I am only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers, ending poverty and finding treaties, what a wonderful place this earth would be.
“At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you are attending these conferences, who you are doing this for. We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in.
“Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying, ‘Everything’s going to be all right, it’s not the end of the world, and we’re doing the best we can’. But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My dad always says, ‘You are what you do, not what you say’. Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you.”
It is impossible for tariffs to fix problems caused by making the dollar the world’s reserve currency then removing the last constraints on global deficit spending!
If you support Trump’s tariffs as some sort of cure to trade imbalances, please read the above sentence over and over again until it finally sinks in that Trump is on a foolish path.
Historic Balance of Trade
From 1866 to 1968 the US generally had a trade surplus.
The US had huge trade surpluses during and just after WWI and WWII.
Why?
The productive output of Europe was destroyed. US production was not harmed in either war.
Although no US production was destroyed in the Korean War or the War in Vietnam, in both cases US production was diverted from productive uses to asinine uses, especially true for the Vietnam war.
Other nations were not stupid enough to get involved in a significant way, if at all.
Chinese Imports
Tut tut some may say. Harsh words indeed.
Their argument is that Nixon established trade relations with China in 1972.
OK let’s take a look.
US Imports from China did not soar until after China joined the WTO in 2001.
The US current account stared sinking well before NAFTA.
So, what is the cause?
No Enforcement Mechanism
Gold provided an enforcement mechanism against mercantilism, massive deficit spending, and huge government subsidies.
Starting August 15, 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window, there has been no enforcement mechanism.
That’s a problem that tariffs cannot possibly cure.
Why the Delayed Response to Nixon?
Nixon said it was “temporary”.
Guess what? It wasn’t.
Tariffs cannot possibly fix this issue.
Tariffs can only make matters worse by increasing costs on consumers and industries.
UMich Confidence Rebounds But Democrats Get More Depressed
The preliminary UMich data showed a modest rebound in September after August’s collapse and final data confirmed that trend continued into the end of the month:
Source: Bloomberg
Buying conditions were flat for housing…
Source: Bloomberg
Higher income Americans saw the smallest rise in confidence…
Source: Bloomberg
UMich notes that impeachments divert the attention of the President and Congress away from economic policies, and may become conflated with partisan strategies.
The big divergence was, once again, political as Dems confidence slumped to 72.0 vs 75.7 and Reps confidence rose to 119.5 from 112.8
Source: Bloomberg
Despite the high levels of confidence, consumers have also expressed rising levels of economic uncertainty. Some of these concerns are rooted in partisanship, some due to conditions in the global economy (Brexit, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China), and some are tied to domestic economic policies.
Trade policies have had the greatest negative impact on consumers, with a near record one-third of all consumers negatively mentioning trade policies in September when asked to explain in their own words the factors underlying their economic expectations
A wave of oil and gas wells abandoned by bankrupted drillers could cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars.
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) studied oil and gas wells drilled on federal lands, and found that the public could get stuck with a significant tab from companies that go out of business.
Inactive wells that have not been properly plugged present environmental threats, from methane leaks to surface, air and groundwater contamination. Reclaiming a well that goes offline involves plugging it, removing structures and revegetating that landscape.
On federal lands, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) collects a bond upfront that can be returned to a driller after reclamation. If the well is not properly reclaimed at the end of its life, BLM uses the bond to pay for the cleanup.
But the problem is that the bond payments are often too low to cover the cost of reclamation. BLM regulations have minimum bond rates at $10,000 per lease, $25,000 for all wells in a state and $150,000 for all wells nationwide.
When a company abandons a well because it cannot afford to clean it up, the well becomes “orphaned,” and tends to fall to BLM. But the agency does not have the funds to handle a wave of orphaned wells because the bonds that drillers pay are too low. “Bonds held by BLM have not provided sufficient financial assurance to prevent orphaned oil and gas wells,” the GAO report found. For instance, GAO identified 89 new orphaned wells between July 2017 and April 2019, which could cost as much as $46 million to clean up.
More eye-opening was the fact that the agency identified nearly 3,000 wells that are at risk of becoming orphaned. Costs for reclaiming old wells vary widely, so much so that the GAO offered two scenarios: low-cost wells can cost $20,000 a piece, while high-costs wells can reach $145,000. For those 3,000 at-risk wells, the cleanup tab for the federal government could range from $46 million to $333 million.
Roughly 84 percent of bonds are likely too low to reclaim the wells to which they are linked. “Bonds generally do not reflect reclamation costs because most bonds are set at their regulatory minimum values, and these minimums have not been adjusted since the 1950s and 1960s to account for inflation,” GAO said. It can also be decades between when a bond is paid and reclamation is actually completed. Notably, the average bond that BLM has on hand has declined over the years on a per-well basis, from $2,207 per well in 2008 to $2,122 per well in 2018.
This may seem like a rather arcane problem, but it is significant for two reasons.
First, the number of shale wells have proliferated in recent years, drilled at ever-increasing depths, which makes reclamation pricier.
Second, the shale industry is indebted and the financial foundation could begin to crumble, leaving a growing mountain of orphaned wells for the government as companies go out of business. Already more than 190 shale E&Ps have gone bankrupt since 2015.
“I talk to those guys, all the fracking companies, on a daily basis. I’m very engaged in what they are doing with their business, and I completely believe that the current model is unsustainable,” Scott Forbes, vice president of the Lower 48 for Wood Mackenzie, told E&E News.
It is because of this heightened financial stress that concerns over a wave of orphaned wells are rising. As E&E News notes, New Mexico requires a bond of $250,000 for companies with over 100 wells, which only translates into $2,500 per well at best, a paltry figure compared to reclamation costs.
Ultimately, if the full cost of reclamation was required upfront, there could be a lot less drilling.
The GAO report came at the request of Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-NM) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), both of which come from states with abandoned wells. “The oil and gas industry’s boom-and-bust cycles can lead operators to drill wells when prices for oil and gas are high but can contribute to bankruptcies when prices are low,” the GAO wrote in a letter to the congressmen that accompanied the report.
GAO recommended the U.S. Congress grant BLM the authority to obtain funds from drillers to reclaim orphaned wells while also requiring the agency to develop a mechanism to do so. It also said that BLM should hike bond rates to reflect actual costs of cleanup.
Rep. Lowenthal introduced a bill last week that increased the minimum bond payment for federal lands.
On the impeachment front… The anonymous whistleblower complaint about Donald Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president (and subsequent alleged attempts to cover it up) was apparently lodged not long after a CIA officer raised the issue around the office.
“The officer first shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the C.I.A.’s top lawyer through an anonymous process,” The New York Timesreported on Thursday night. “The lawyer shared the officer’s concerns with White House and Justice Department officials, following policy.”
Then, about two weeks later, the officer “decided to file a whistle-blower complaint to [inspector general for intelligence agencies Michael] Atkinson, a step that offers special legal protections, unlike going to a general counsel,” according to the Times.
Lawyers representing the person who filed the whistleblower complaint did not confirm that the CIA agent was their client, saying: “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”
Executive Editor Dean Banquet defended the paper’s decision:
We decided to publish limited information about the whistle-blower—including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House—because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible. We also understand that the White House already knew he was a C.I.A. officer.
Meanwhile, Trump isn’t letting whistleblowers and the possibility of impeachment dim his capacity for cruel immigration policy. Yesterday the administration announced that it would lower the refugee cap from its current 30,000 down to 18,000.
“The coming year’s 18,000-person cap will be the lowest since the refugee resettlement program began in 1980, a major shift from the 110,000 refugee admissions former President Barack Obama proposed for fiscal year 2017,” Politicopoints out.
The net increase of immigrants in the American population dropped to about 200,000 people in 2018, a decline of more than 70 percent from the year before, according to William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis.
“It’s remarkable,” said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, of the 2018 numbers. “This is something that really hasn’t happened since the Great Recession. This should be very concerning to the administration that its policies are scaring people away.”
Young people are leaving big cities. “Large U.S. cities lost tens of thousands of millennial and younger Gen X residents last year, according to Census figures released Thursday that offer fresh signs of cooling urban growth,” TheWall Street Journalreports. According to the paper’s analysis of census figures:
Cities with more than a half million people collectively lost almost 27,000 residents age 25 to 39 in 2018….It was the fourth consecutive year that big cities saw this population of young adults shrink. New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington and Portland, Ore., were among those that lost large numbers of residents in this age group.
The drop in young urban residents last year was smaller than in 2017, when big cities lost nearly 54,000 residents in this age group. But the sustained declines signal a sharp reversal from the beginning of the decade, when young adults flooded into cities and helped lead an urban revival.
The 2018 drop was driven by a fall in the number of urban residents between 35 and 39 years old. While the number of adults younger than that rose in big cities, those gains have tapered off in recent years.
QUICK HITS
The next small but significant step in congressional criminal justice reform moves involves federal sentencing policy. The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would “end the unjust practice of judges increasing sentences based on conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury,” says a press release from sponsoring Senators Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).
The president doesn’t understand the difference between an apostrophe and a hyphen, among other things:
To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!
A Mississippi city is claiming undocumented immigrants don’t have a right not to be killed by police:
Sweet Moses. Last year, cops in Miss. went to the wrong address, then shot and killed an innocent man in his own home. His family sued. The city claims his family has no standing, because as an undocumented immigrant, **he had no constitutional rights.** https://t.co/Nk7XQz7IKp
A new measure in the large Australian state of New South Wales “overturned a 119-year-old law that made it a criminal offense to procure or administer an abortion.”
Tech executives in a CNBC poll voted Facebook the technology giant “most likely to face punitive action as a result of the federal government’s antitrust review of Silicon Valley.”
Uber’s redesign will “combine Uber’s ride-hailing and food delivery apps, boost new modes of transportation like scooters and add safety features.”
Everybody’s canceled!
No, you idiots, you weren’t supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people’s dumb old tweets in the first place
Trump Slams ‘Fraud’ Adam Schiff For Reading Fabricated Mafia Version Of ‘Ukraine Transcript’
President Trump on Friday called for the resignation of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) after the House Intelligence Committee Chairman kicked off a Thursday hearing with a completely fabricated version of a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainan President Volodomyr Zelensky.
To recap on Schiff’s alternate reality:
Wow.
My jaw is on the floor.
“Intelligence” Committee Adam Schiff just fabricated, out of thin-air, the contents of the Trump phone call with Ukraine’s President.
Not a word he says here is true. Not. A. Word.
This entire dark carnival is sad, unhinged Orange Man Bad fan fiction. pic.twitter.com/EzzFDt9BIU
Imagine how bankrupt, twisted & corrupt you must be to sit before the live TV cameras of the world & fabricate a **dozen** quotes from the President of the United States.
All while chairing the House Intelligence committee.
Furthermore, you have the DAMN transcript in hand
Clown.
“The fact that that’s not clear is a separate problem in and of itself. Of course, the president never said, ‘If you don’t understand me, I’m going to say it seven more times.’ My point is that’s the message that the Ukraine president was receiving, in not so many words,” Schiff later clarified, adding “My summary of the president’s call was meant to be at least part in parody.”
An unapologetic Schiff later toldCNN‘s Wolf Blitzer that he was mocking President Trump and suggested that everyone should have known that.
In response, President Trump called for Schiff’s resignation, tweeting on Friday “Rep. Adam Schiff fraudulently read to Congress, with millions of people watching, a version of my conversation with the President of Ukraine that doesn’t exist,” adding “He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, and me sound guilty.”
“Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!“
…sound horrible, and me sound guilty. HE WAS DESPERATE AND HE GOT CAUGHT. Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!
Rep. Adam Schiff totally made up my conversation with Ukraine President and read it to Congress and Millions. He must resign and be investigated. He has been doing this for two years. He is a sick man!
On the impeachment front… The anonymous whistleblower complaint about Donald Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president (and subsequent alleged attempts to cover it up) was apparently lodged not long after a CIA officer raised the issue around the office.
“The officer first shared information about potential abuse of power and a White House cover-up with the C.I.A.’s top lawyer through an anonymous process,” The New York Timesreported on Thursday night. “The lawyer shared the officer’s concerns with White House and Justice Department officials, following policy.”
Then, about two weeks later, the officer “decided to file a whistle-blower complaint to [inspector general for intelligence agencies Michael] Atkinson, a step that offers special legal protections, unlike going to a general counsel,” according to the Times.
Lawyers representing the person who filed the whistleblower complaint did not confirm that the CIA agent was their client, saying: “The whistle-blower has a right to anonymity.”
Executive Editor Dean Banquet defended the paper’s decision:
We decided to publish limited information about the whistle-blower—including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House—because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible. We also understand that the White House already knew he was a C.I.A. officer.
Meanwhile, Trump isn’t letting whistleblowers and the possibility of impeachment dim his capacity for cruel immigration policy. Yesterday the administration announced that it would lower the refugee cap from its current 30,000 down to 18,000.
“The coming year’s 18,000-person cap will be the lowest since the refugee resettlement program began in 1980, a major shift from the 110,000 refugee admissions former President Barack Obama proposed for fiscal year 2017,” Politicopoints out.
The net increase of immigrants in the American population dropped to about 200,000 people in 2018, a decline of more than 70 percent from the year before, according to William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis.
“It’s remarkable,” said David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, of the 2018 numbers. “This is something that really hasn’t happened since the Great Recession. This should be very concerning to the administration that its policies are scaring people away.”
Young people are leaving big cities. “Large U.S. cities lost tens of thousands of millennial and younger Gen X residents last year, according to Census figures released Thursday that offer fresh signs of cooling urban growth,” TheWall Street Journalreports. According to the paper’s analysis of census figures:
Cities with more than a half million people collectively lost almost 27,000 residents age 25 to 39 in 2018….It was the fourth consecutive year that big cities saw this population of young adults shrink. New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington and Portland, Ore., were among those that lost large numbers of residents in this age group.
The drop in young urban residents last year was smaller than in 2017, when big cities lost nearly 54,000 residents in this age group. But the sustained declines signal a sharp reversal from the beginning of the decade, when young adults flooded into cities and helped lead an urban revival.
The 2018 drop was driven by a fall in the number of urban residents between 35 and 39 years old. While the number of adults younger than that rose in big cities, those gains have tapered off in recent years.
QUICK HITS
The next small but significant step in congressional criminal justice reform moves involves federal sentencing policy. The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would “end the unjust practice of judges increasing sentences based on conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury,” says a press release from sponsoring Senators Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).
The president doesn’t understand the difference between an apostrophe and a hyphen, among other things:
To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!
A Mississippi city is claiming undocumented immigrants don’t have a right not to be killed by police:
Sweet Moses. Last year, cops in Miss. went to the wrong address, then shot and killed an innocent man in his own home. His family sued. The city claims his family has no standing, because as an undocumented immigrant, **he had no constitutional rights.** https://t.co/Nk7XQz7IKp
A new measure in the large Australian state of New South Wales “overturned a 119-year-old law that made it a criminal offense to procure or administer an abortion.”
Tech executives in a CNBC poll voted Facebook the technology giant “most likely to face punitive action as a result of the federal government’s antitrust review of Silicon Valley.”
Uber’s redesign will “combine Uber’s ride-hailing and food delivery apps, boost new modes of transportation like scooters and add safety features.”
Everybody’s canceled!
No, you idiots, you weren’t supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people’s dumb old tweets in the first place
Climate activist Greta Thunberg’s recent speech to the United Nations seemed to reveal a deeply troubled individual. She said her childhood was taken away from her by the looming threat of climate change, and she blamed world leaders for letting it happen. She has every reason to be upset, but she is directing her anger at the wrong people. The real culprit is the green catastrophe industry that manufactures crises out of nothing.
Never-Ending Story
The critical ingredient in Thunberg’s climate anxiety is her youth. Had she been older, she would have lived through so many false alarms that she would have grown numb and wary of green catastrophists.
Greta Thunberg
Those older remember when former Vice President Al Gore declared that the North Pole would be ice-free by 2015. People were told that snow would be a thing of the past. Instead, the Northern Hemisphere has seen record levels of snow. In recent years it has snowed in the Sahara, Saudi Arabia, and even the Canary Islands, which is at the same latitude as Miami, FL.
And don’t forget the polar bears. The melting Arctic was supposed to render this animal extinct. Of the population of 8,000-10,000 in the late 1960s, only 25,000-30,000 remain today.
In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen scared the entire world by predicting that the globe would warm 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) by 2018. In fact, the warming was less than half of that, and in the last two decades, the increase has ground to a halt, giving rise to the so-called “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming.
Those who are even older remember the acid rain scare. All the trees were going to die because of pollution from fossil fuels. The opposite happened. CO2 is plant food, and human emissions have been hungrily gobbled up by plants, resulting in an unprecedented greening of the earth, especially in arid areas. All over the world, deserts are yielding to vegetation.
Seniors may even remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s. Temperatures were plunging, and humans might have to cover glaciers with soot to stave off a coming ice age.
In 1972, the Club of Rome predicted mass starvation and complete depletion of oil and other natural resources. It was so wrong that today environmentalists complain there is too much fossil energy left to explore.
Green catastrophism is a never-ending story. Green activists try to scare people into submission, and the youngest and most ignorant are always the most vulnerable, as evidenced by Thunberg, who falsely believes that the world is heading for mass extinction.
Naïve Progressives
One group of adults is as ignorant and naïve as the children who are scared by the climate alarmism: progressives. The reason for their ignorance is that they consider the wisdom and knowledge of the past as evil and passé. Salvation always lies in the future. The pot of progress is always to be found at the end of the rainbow. That’s why they meet every failed attempt at building utopia with a shrug: “That wasn’t real socialism.”
OK Climate
Despite the hysteria, there is no scientific basis for climate panic. The warming continues to be lukewarm, the oceans are not rising much, and the weather is not growing more extreme. We still have plenty of time to wait and see if climate change needs to be handled. Should it turn out to be a problem, Bill Gates and others have invested in technologies that could render the whole world carbon neutral overnight, either with nuclear power or carbon capture.
Children should sleep soundly; there are no climate monsters under the bed. It is cruel and irresponsible to fill the vulnerable young with the dread of a non-existent problem.
