The Looking Glass World Of "Climate Injustice" -- Part II

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  • This is Part II of what will now be a series titled “The Looking Glass World Of ‘Climate Injustice.’” The original post in what is now this series appeared way back on April 11, 2014.

  • The thesis was that while climate campaigners prattle on about very minor supposed differential impacts of “climate change'“ upon the poor, at the same time the same campaigners demand schemes to intentionally devastate the economic situation of the poor by decreasing the availability and increasing the price of energy.

  • The particular focus of the April 2014 post was policies advocated by the U.N., although the reasoning would apply equally to all national and international schemes to reduce carbon emissions.

  • Fast forward seven years to today, and we now have the Biden administration going all in on the embrace of what they call “environmental justice” as the prime motivation behind trillions of proposed dollars of spending to transform the nation’s energy economy

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Federal Court Declares Immigration Statute Unconstitutional

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  • The topic of the moment here at Manhattan Contrarian has been how judges with a religious zeal to perfect the world (according to their own woke vision) can go completely off the rails with sweeping orders to transform the entire country.

  • In Sunday’s post, it was a Federal District Judge in Oregon (Ann Aiken — we believe in naming names here at MC) and another one from Los Angeles sitting by designation on the Ninth Circuit (Josephine Staton) seeking to establish the use of general constitutional provisions (Fifth Amendment Due Process clause and Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection clause) as a basis for a court to require the government to end all use of fossil fuels. Fortunately, a couple of cooler heads on the Ninth Circuit stepped in to put a stop to that one.

  • In Tuesday’s post it was judges in the Netherlands (including the Supreme Court) and Germany (Constitutional Court), not to mention the European Court of Human Rights, similarly using amorphous concepts like the “sustainability principle” and the “precautionary principle” and the “fairness principle” and a constitutional duty (Netherlands) to “keep the country habitable” again to justify sweeping judicial orders restricting fossil fuel use.

  • For today’s adventure in wild judicial activism, we have a Federal District Judge from Nevada essentially declaring all federal immigration law unconstitutional on the ground that it is racist.

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More On European Climate Change Litigation: These People Are Crazy

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  • It’s easy to look at “climate change” litigation in the U.S. and conclude that a good percentage of our environmental bureaucrats and judges who get involved in these things are crazy.

  • Thus many courts around the country (mostly state courts) have allowed lawsuits seeking damages against oil companies over greenhouse gas emissions from their products to proceed at least beyond the preliminary stages. And the EPA, early in the Obama administration (2009) issued what is called the “Endangerment Finding,” declaring CO2 and other GHGs to be a “danger to public health and welfare” — a ridiculous determination that the Trump administration nevertheless did not attempt to undo, and which substantially ties the government’s hands in contesting wacky climate-related cases. Not that the Biden Administration can be counted on to contest these cases at all, no matter how preposterous.

  • We do have in the U.S. this thing called the doctrine of “non-justiciability.” The doctrine has been around for a long time, and is well-established in many precedents. As discussed in my most recent post, it was the non-justiciability doctrine that sank the Juliana case, which sought to get a court to order the end of the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. on the basis of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even two of three Obama-appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with that rationale.

  • But let’s consider Europe.

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Update On The International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

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  • Having had a long career in the litigation business, I have a well-developed appreciation for the limits on what can be accomplished through lawsuits. Among litigators, the line “Let’s sue the bastards” is always good for a laugh, in rueful recognition of the enormous amounts of effort that can be expended for little, or even negative, results.

  • But the green environmental movement appears to have both near infinite funding and legions of adherents filled with crazed religious zeal. When somebody in this crowd blurts out “Let’s sue the bastards,” the funding immediately emerges, and ideologue lawyers line up to compete for the gig.

  • So somehow these guys got the idea of suing national governments on the theory that “fundamental human rights” are threatened by climate change.

  • Would that allegation be enough to get one or a few judges to order the judicial takeover of entire national economies to force the lowering of CO2 emissions?

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVIII

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVIII

  • What I refer to as the “Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of historical world temperatures to make it appear, falsely, that the most recent months and years are the “warmest ever.” The basic technique of the fraud is the artificial lowering of previously-reported data as to world temperatures in earlier years, in order to erase earlier warmth and amplify the apparent warming trend. This is the 28th post in this series. The previous post in the series appeared on October 5, 2020. To view all 27 prior posts, you can go to this composite link.

  • The deliverable products of the temperature fraudsters are purported charts of world temperatures derived from a thermometer-based surface record (called GHCN, or Global Historical Climate Network), generally going back to about 1880. The charts are engineered to appear in an iconic “hockey stick” shape, with relatively flat earlier years followed by a sharply rising “blade” in the most recent years.

  • Every few years the government (this is a joint effort of NASA and NOAA) comes out with a new version of these data. The latest version is called GHCN version 4, which began in 2018.

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More From Murray's "Facing Reality"

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  • I’ve now finished Charles Murray’s “Facing Reality.” It’s not a long book — 125 pages pre-footnotes. There are extensive references to online data archives and scholarly articles that you can review if you are so inclined; but as far as text goes, that’s it.

  • The core of the book is a summary of readily-available statistical data as to differences between and among racial groups in the U.S. The two areas of statistics on which Murray focuses are those relating to “cognitive ability” and “violent crime.” The racial categories that he uses are the ones generally used by government statisticians, including the Census, although he has adopted somewhat different nomenclature — European, African, Latin and Asian.

  • The group differences found in the statistics are not small.

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