Rule by Democrats isn’t cheap. Green New Deal lunacy will cost New Yorkers hundreds of $billions:

New Yorkers will have to pay “hundreds of billions of dollars” in higher utility bills due to the state’s “Green New Deal”-inspired plan, according to a top energy regulatory official — who accused lawmakers of hiding the true cost of the bill.

John Howard, former chairman and current member of the state Public Service Commission, claimed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic-run legislature never leveled with the public on the costs associated with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act approved in 2019.

Why would they level with voters? Nothing having to do with the global warming hoax is on the level.

Since it was politically inconvenient to raise taxes enough to pay for this, it will be financed through utility rate increases. That will have the benefit of allowing Democrats to demonize the power company.

The law, which Cuomo signed in a ceremony with Al Gore at his side, requires New York to slash greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030 and no less than 85% by 2050 by transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, such as hydropower, solar and wind. The state Climate Action Council, meanwhile, is charged with developing a plan to put the state on a path toward zero carbon emissions.

Zero carbon emissions would literally mean zero human activity.

For an idea of what it would mean for America as a whole to let Democrats consolidate power nationally the way they have in New York, refer to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Left unchecked, their ambitions will utterly destroy the economy, leading to the death by starvation of a large percentage of the population. Already Biden et al. have turned what should have been a post-Covid boom into a lurch toward recession.

There is zero chance that Democrats’ extravagantly expensive climate posturing will have a perceptible effect on global temperature.

On a tip from Wiggins.

As we saw coming, a combination of bad weather and partial reliance on green energy has put Texans in a bad place:

A frigid blast of winter weather across the U.S. plunged Texas into an unusually icy emergency Monday that knocked out power to more than 2 million people…

Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without electricity for hours had no certainty about when the lights and heat would come back on…

We are told by the liberal establishment — incredibly, with a straight face — that we must ever more massively subsidize wind turbines and watch the government progressively throttle more efficient means of generating energy because there is a “climate emergency,” fossil fuels having made it be too warm out.

At least Texans can console themselves that they are not the only ones to have made the mistake of letting themselves be bullied into partial reliance of wind energy, which does not work when the turbines are covered in ice:

Sky News host Cory Bernardi says Germany “should be thankful” for non-renewable energy after forced reliance on surrounding countries’ power after a cold snap froze solar panels and wind turbines.

“These monuments to green madness need to draw current from the remains of the fossil fuel power grid to stop them from getting frozen solid,” he said.

Forbes lists some of the lessons we are learning the hard way:

The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.

That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics.

Texas relies on forests of hideous wind turbines to generate 20% of its energy. The result:

Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.

In other words, he wrote this from our green energy future.

This blizzard proves that we have not been taking our energy security seriously enough. …

This blizzard proves that during extreme weather winter, solar panels and wind turbines are of little or no value to the electric grid.

This blizzard proves that our natural gas grid is part of our critical infrastructure and that we shut it down at our peril. The natural gas network is essential because it can deliver big surges in energy supplies during periods of peak demand. … [W]e can store vast amounts of gas and only tiny quantities of electricity.

Natural gas is cheap, clean, efficient, and abundant. But Democrats don’t like it, because it is politically unclean according to their faith. That’s why they are phasing it out in favor of having us shiver in the dark.

It’s essential to note that the blizzard and blackouts that are paralyzing the country are occurring at roughly the same time that some of America’s most famous activists and politicians are saying we should quit using all hydrocarbons and dozens of cities across the country are imposing bans on the use of natural gas.

Those who freeze to death are sacrifices on the altar of moonbat ideology. Every winter will be like this and worse if liberals are not dislodged from power.

Tucker Carlson reports on the Green New Deal arriving in Texas:

On tips from Wiggins, Chuck A, Henry, Lyle, and Dragon’s Lair. Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

There is at least one difference between the Green New Deal and the lunatic social engineering schemes the Khmer Rouge used to depopulate Cambodia. Pol Pot never thought to set his policies to music. Clap along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as moonbats sing the Green New Deal Song:

The purpose of the event was to remind Joe Biden that radicals like AOC expect to call the shots within the Democratic Party. They have run roughshod over Nancy Pelosi. Steamrolling befuddled Biden should be child’s play — perfectly suited to their childlike mentality.

Just because these people are absurd doesn’t mean they can’t destroy the country.

On a tip from Dragon’s Lair. Hat tip: Not the Bee.

Someone sure knew how to dress for a big haul this Halloween:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken dressed his 4-year-old son as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a Halloween event with President Biden on the White House lawn Monday night.

Nice try, but he didn’t make out nearly as well as the real Zelensky.

Biden gave the young “Zelensky,” who wore a dark green sweatshirt, a box of M&Ms bearing the presidential seal — after asking Congress earlier this month to give another $61.4 billion for the real deal, on top of $113 billion already appropriated to help Kyiv resist Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.

Details on what percentage gets kicked back to a Swiss bank account for the Big Guy have not been revealed, though we are learning more about the dirty money Biden has been taking from our ChiCom adversaries.

Blinken was accompanied by his wife, Biden’s White House cabinet secretary Evan Ryan, and their 3-year-old daughter, who was dressed in the Ukrainian flag’s blue-and-yellow scheme.

Small children make great political props, with the added benefit that they grow up indoctrinated. Just please have mercy and refrain from transsexualizing them.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Not even the dead are safe from the dysfunction that is inseparable from moonbattery:

The awful smell seeped from a neglected building in a small Colorado town for days, followed by a report that made police take a closer look at the “green” funeral operator’s storage facility. Inside, they made a gruesome discovery: At least 115 decaying bodies.

Investigators were tight-lipped Friday about exactly what they found inside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, but their plans to bring in teams that usually deal with airline crashes, coroners from nearby jurisdictions and the FBI pointed to a grim mess.

On the bright side, FBI agents inspecting rotting corpses at environmentally correct funeral parlors may be too busy to investigate Trump supporters.

On a tip from Chris Neilson.

There is nothing that envirofascists will not take away from us in the name of the global warming hoax — not even New York City pizza:

The city Department of Environmental Protection has drafted insane new rules that could force pizza joints using wood- and coal-fired ovens — the only way to really cook a pie — to slash emissions by up to 75%.

Hitting the target would require installation of a pricey filtration system on older ovens, slamming mostly older, classic spots like Lombardi’s in Little Italy and Brooklyn-based icon Grimaldi’s.

Not all businesses can afford pricey filtration systems, the only point of which would be to demonstrate submission to leftist authorities by ruining the taste of the pizza. But as Shrillary famously told us, “undercapitalized” businesses that are forced into bankruptcy by their tyrannical policies are no concern of Democrats.

As one outraged customer told The Post: “I’m all for responsible environmental practice, but tell Al Gore to take one less private jet or something.”

Fat chance. The imaginary climate crisis calls for sacrifice by regular Americans, not the woke ruling class.

Those regular Americans are still out there, even in liberal New York. Here’s one who deserves a tip of the hat:

Pushback will become more widespread when the Climate Police inevitably come for beer. Moonbats will be firmly informed that there is nothing wrong with the weather and they couldn’t change it even if there were.

On tips from Franco, Wiggins, DCGere, and Blackjack.

Natural gas is an ideal source of energy; it is efficient, plentiful, and good for the environment because it burns so cleanly. So it will come as no surprise that the leftists who run New York intend to ban it:

Gas stoves will soon become toast in New York, under a controversial new handshake deal between Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and Albany lawmakers that would make that state the first in the US to ban natural gas.

The pending budget deal mandates all new buildings under seven stories be fully electric by 2026 with larger structures following three years later.

With a straight face, we are told this will prevent the climate from continuing to fluctuate the way it always has and always will. Specifically, Hochul says banning gas stoves will protect New York from hurricanes and excessive snow. Her estimation of her constituents’ intelligence is not high.

Hochul notably has kept gas stoves in her own Buffalo home and the Executive Mansion in Albany while pushing for the gas ban in future buildings through the state budget process.

The point, as with the war on nuclear energy, is to make electricity prohibitively expensive, even while making us increasingly reliant on it by mandating inferior electric stoves, electric cars, et cetera.

This will add to the burdens already imposed by green energy efforts, including a 2022 state law signed by Hochul that will ban the sales of gas automobiles by 2035.

You have to wonder how blatantly hostile Democrats would need to be toward those they rule before people will cast off their liberal media brainwashing and start pushing back.

On tips from Chuck A and Wiggins.

The globalist green agenda calls to mind the lunatic utopian ambitions of the Khmer Rouge, which managed to kill as much as 30% of the population of Cambodia. Fortunately, pushback has begun — and not only in the Netherlands. Sri Lanka’s president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been toppled for inflicting green tyranny:

He campaigned for president in 2019 on a platform that promised a form of technocratic utopia, including the commitment to turn Sri Lankan agriculture completely organic in a decade.

But the relatively educated, middle-income population balked when it got what it voted for, just as the American population is beginning to balk after grasping the implications of Biden’s hostility to the fossil fuels we require to survive.

On April 27, 2021—with no warning, and with no attempt to teach farmers how to cope with the change—he announced a ban on all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Henceforth, he decreed, Sri Lankan agriculture would be 100% organic.

The economic consequences were predictably catastrophic.

Food prices soared as a result of scarcity and Sri Lanka’s people, their pockets already hit by the pandemic, began to go hungry. To add to the stench of failure, a shipload of manure from China had to be turned back after samples revealed dangerous levels of bacteria.

Communist manure is more politically correct than fertilizer, but that does not mean it will keep people fed. Turns out, people like to eat more than they like moonbattery.

Having overstepped to the point of being forcibly thrown out of power, green authoritarians will temper their arrogance, right? Of course not:

The U.K.-based Soil Association tweeted this: “Lots of lessons to be learnt from Sri Lanka, but ‘see, organic doesn’t work’ isn’t one of them.”

Sure it is. But the main lesson is that we will starve if we do not pry envirotyrants from power.

On a tip from Varla.

The science is settled when it comes to green energy: it doesn’t work, except as a means of laundering taxpayer money to pay off campaign donors à la Barack Obama. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy are sufficiently efficient to keep a modern economy afloat. Windmills, ethanol, et cetera are not.

This story from Wales is emblematic of wind turbines, which are expensive, unreliable, hideous, and deadly to endangered birds:

A huge 300ft wind turbine collapsed at a wind farm near Gilfach Goch.

Photos taken at the Pant Y Wal wind farm on Monday morning (February 14) show the huge turbine lying on the ground, separated from its base with its blades completely destroyed.

Check out the scale of these monstrosities:

No one knows why the turbine decided to fall down. Maybe the wind blew:

Storm Dudley is expected to affect the UK on Wednesday night and Thursday, bringing a period of very strong and disruptive winds, while Storm Eunice is likely to hit on Friday, leading to more very strong winds that could cause significant disruption.

If the wind doesn’t blow, there is no power. If it does blow, the pricey turbines might fall down.

No worries. Taxpayers have plenty of money to build new ones. Disposing of the dead turbines is no trouble; they can be repurposed as bridges:

On a former train track bed connecting the towns of Midleton and Youghal in County Cork, Ireland, workers recently excavated the rusted remains of an old railway bridge and installed a pedestrian one in its place. The bridge would have been an unremarkable milestone in the development of a new pedestrian greenway through the Irish countryside, if not for what it’s made of: recycled wind turbine blades. …

Creative solutions will be necessary to deal with the wind turbine blade waste that’s coming. Averaging over 150 feet in length and weighing upwards of a dozen tons each, wind turbine blades take up huge amounts of space in landfills. Once there, the ultra-sturdy, fiber-reinforced plastics they’re made of don’t break down easily. Decommissioned wind turbine blades, if they’re not just stockpiled, are often destined for landfills today. The main alternative, incinerating them for energy, creates additional pollution.

If the bridges collapse, this will have the added benefit of discouraging people from traveling, which makes it be too warm outside, according to the same leftist ideology that has us wasting money on windmills.

Ethanol doesn’t make sense either:

Researchers found that emissions from changes in land use to account for the growing demand for corn make corn-based ethanol no cleaner than gasoline.

In fact, they determined that these changes likely make ethanol’s emissions at least 24 percent higher than those for gasoline, according to their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, ethanol subsidies help politicians get votes from farm states. Green energy is what you get when politics is put before energy.

On tips from Steve T.

Soros-backed leftist DAs have been wreaking havoc, spreading blood across the pavements of American cities. George Gascon (Los Angeles), Kim Foxx (Chicago), Larry Krasner (Philadelphia), Chesa Boudin (San Francisco), and Kim Gardner (St Louis) are among the most egregious. As warned earlier, we can add another to the list — and in our largest city. Maniacal moonbat Alvin Bragg is now Manhattan District Attorney:

Bragg says his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” for anything short of murder or deadly assault (“carceral” being progressive double-speak for prison). Also, he says minor crime won’t be prosecuted at all.

As we saw when making shoplifting a misdemeanor resulted in an epidemic of smash and grab looting in California, what progressives are doing is imposing anarchy on behalf of criminals.

The Broken Windows policy that converted NYC from a violent cesspool into a livable city under Giuliani has now been thrown into full reverse. The consequences are so predictable that they must be intended.

Most of those killed in the ensuing violence will be nonwhites, whose lives count for more according to the ideology of our ruling class. Yet again, we see that this ideology is a lie.

The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. With the exception of graft, all leftists ever care about is power. To achieve ultimate power, the old society must be destroyed so that they can construct a new one on its ashes.

The law & order rhetoric that helped Eric Adams get elected counts for nothing. Alvin Bragg is steering this ship — straight for Niagara Falls on behalf of George Soros, who donated $1 million to Bragg’s campaign.

A receipt for Soros’s purchase comes in the form of a memo from Bragg to his staff. The New York Post summarizes:

• Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no “genuine risk of physical harm” to anyone. …

• Convicted criminals caught with weapons other than guns will have those felony charges downgraded to misdemeanors unless they’re also charged with more serious offenses. …

• Burglars who steal from residential storage areas, parts of homes that aren’t “accessible to a living area” and businesses located in mixed-use buildings will be prosecuted for a low-level class D felony that only covers break-ins instead of for more serious crimes. …

• Drug dealers believed to be “acting as a low-level agent of a seller” will be prosecuted only for misdemeanor possession.

Considering the ongoing crime wave that has inevitably followed the Black Lives Matter riots and Democrats’ defunding of police, this is the worst possible time to lighten up on crime — unless the objective is to create more mayhem.

Readers are advised to steer clear of New York City; it is behind enemy lines.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Meanwhile, as Democrats plot to ram through a version of AOC’s Green New Deal in the form of a crippling $3.5 trillion spending bill, other countries have begun to discover what it means to be forced by deranged tyrants to rely on green energy:

As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves. Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.

Government will not change course unless forced to. Not even Joe Biden is dim enough to think any of this will improve the weather. The green agenda is about increasing government power, nothing more.

The Times reports that a shortage of carbon dioxide caused by high gas prices may constitute a “black swan event”:

The closure of two fertiliser plants in northern England and others in Europe has left the food and drink industry facing a shortage of carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of fertiliser manufacturing. The gas is critical to the production and transport of a range of products, from meat to bread, beer and fizzy drinks.

The meat industry estimates that businesses can carry on for less than two weeks before carbon dioxide stocks run out….

Turns out carbon dioxide is not a menace to the human race after all. Plants aren’t the only ones that need it. The CO2 shortage could cause Christmas to be canceled.

Meanwhile,

Natural gas and electricity markets were already surging in Europe when a fresh catalyst emerged: The wind in the stormy North Sea stopped blowing.

The sudden slowdown in wind-driven electricity production off the coast of the U.K. in recent weeks whipsawed through regional energy markets. Gas and coal-fired electricity plants were called in to make up the shortfall from wind. …

The electricity price shock was most acute in the U.K., which has leaned on wind farms to eradicate net carbon emissions by 2050. Prices for carbon credits, which electricity producers need to burn fossil fuels, are at records, too.

Food and energy on one hand, delusional left-wing climate ideology on the other. We are going to have to choose.

On tips from Kevin R., Mr. Freemarket, Dragon’s Lair, and Bluto.

If global warming ideology were on the level, those who believe in it would not be focused on defacing the landscape and killing birds with unreliable wind turbines. They would be too busy promoting carbon-free nuclear energy and denouncing the communist Chinese:

China now accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world’s developed nations combined, according to new research from Rhodium Group.

China’s emissions of six heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, rose to 14.09 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2019, edging out the total of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members by about 30 million tons, according to the New York-based climate research group.

The OECD comprises 37 countries, including the USA, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Mexico.

China emits twice as much as the USA, despite having a smaller economy. India emits more than the entire European Union.

Yet the climate deals that reflexively treasonous liberals endorse tighten a garrote on the economies of the USA and Europe while mostly allowing China and India to do as they please. It’s almost as if Biden, Kerry, et al. know they cannot control the weather anyway, but just want to cripple the economy, for reasons they are unlikely to share with us but that probably have to do with the Great Reset.

On a tip from Bluto.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent bike buy was a hypocritical farce, but not as phony as this:

Buttigieg seemingly “biked” to a high-profile cabinet meeting [last Thursday] as an eagle-eyed reporter caught the former presidential candidate exiting his SUV just blocks from the White House.

Watch and laugh:

Not even Buttigieg’s bicycle antics are as phony as looting the country for $trillions to be laundered through green energy boondoggles, then calling it “infrastructure.” Phonier still is anyone with an IQ above 60 who claims to believe that the weather is a problem and that people like Biden and Buttigieg can fix it with wasteful spending and virtue signaling.

On tips from Dragon’s Lair and ABC of the ANC.

Meanwhile, as Biden’s handlers prepare to crush America’s capacity to produce energy in the name of lunatic ideology, China marches onward toward economic dominance.

Via Global Warming Policy Forum:

Chinese state-owned utilities are betting on coal’s longevity by building new coal-fired power plants, with their fleets set to expand about 10% by 2025. Just last year, China opened the $30 billion Haoji Railway line, a 2,000-kilometer (1,243-mile) conduit to haul 200 million tons of coal a year directly from central mining basins to energy-hungry regions in the southeast.

Xi Jinping says China will be carbon neutral by 2060. Does anyone other than John Kerry believe him?

Meanwhile, regarding the hideous, inefficient, bird-chopping wind turbines that leftists pretend can replace fossil fuels, Japan is backing away:

The government said Thursday it will remove the two remaining wind power turbines it installed off Fukushima Prefecture citing lack of profit in the project, which cost ¥60 billion ($580 million).

Japan will supposedly be carbon neutral by 2050. That isn’t going to happen either.

Nor is it going to happen in any country. Advanced economies need energy, and for the foreseeable future, much of it will come from fossil fuels.

Countries like Democrats want to reduce America to through the Green New Deal also produce carbon emissions, in the form of peasants burning dung in an attempt to keep warm.

In the meantime, Biden’s handlers should be able to funnel many $billions of taxpayer money to campaign donors through green energy boondoggles like Solyndra, as Obama did.

On tips from ABC of the ANC.