PrairiePundit

 Daily Mail: Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, will be allowed to resume operations after a new court ruling. A federal appeals court panel in Atlanta ruled 2-1 on Thursday to stay US District Judge Kathleen Williams's order to end operations indefinitely at the controversial center, saying it was in the public interest to keep it open. Williams, an Obama-appointed federal judge, had issued a preliminary injunction last month ordering operations at the facility to be wound down by the end of October, with detainees transferred to other facilities and equipment and fencing removed. Her ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Miccosukee Tribe, who used the National Environmental Policy Act to challenge the federal government's use of the facility. The law requires that the federal government conduct an environmental impact study before constructi...

  Red State: As we reported,  an Obama appointee, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, issued an order stopping the expansion of the illegal alien detention center known as "Alligator Alcatraz" and bringing in any new detainees. The main argument against the facility appeared to be  environmental . Within 60 days, “and once the population attrition allows for safe implementation of this Order,” the facility must also remove “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles that were installed to support this project,” the 82-page ruling said. Florida immediately filed an appeal.  A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement that the ruling "ignores the fact that this land has already been developed for a decade. It is another attempt to prevent the President from fulfilling the American people’s mandate to remove the worst of the worst including gang members, murderers, pedophiles, terrorists, and ...

 The Federalist Wire: The President is in a world of trouble. He’s running out of time to turn his ship around. But now President Biden’s made a truly moronic mistake that has his own campaign furious. The White House seems to think that they can ignore all of the major issues facing Americans today like rising inflation, the housing crisis, illegal immigration run rampant, and more, while just pandering to the far-left base’s deranged obsession with Donald Trump and sail to a second term in office. That’s proving to be a risky strategy, to say the least. His approval ratings are a dumpster fire and they are showing no sign of improving at all. In fact, the most recent polls from reputable sources like YouGov and TIPP Insights suggest Biden’s approval ratings are getting worse. What’s been the biggest factors of his worsening favorability in the eyes of the general American public? There’s a few major factors, to be sure. First of all, Americans feel like the economy is only gettin...

 American Action News: Enviros Cheered New York For Shutting Down Huge Nuke Plant. Then Emissions Jumped ... State officials finally closed the Indian Point nuclear facility in 2021, a development that climate activist groups commended because of purported safety and environmental risks posed by the facility. However, about three years after the plant shuttered, the state has seen a sharp increase in the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to power generation due in large part to increased reliance on natural gas to make up for the closed plant’s output, according to a March 2024 analysis conducted by JP Morgan. ... Who knew? 

 The Federalist Wire: ... Conservative accountability group Judicial watch issued the complaint which was received by the New York Post, which asked the Senate Ethics Committee to “immediately investigate” Whitehouse because he pushed for legislation that’s in turn benefited his wife’s environmental consulting company. The group said that there was “strong evidence” that the senator “violated ethics conflicts of interest rules.” “Senator Whitehouse seems to have stepped over the line of standard environmental legislative advocacy and used his Senate office to advance his and his wife’s personal and financial interests,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch said. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) who’s the chairman of the Ethics committee, and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) who’s vice-chair, were also asked to subpoena anyone involved in the scandal if an investigation ends up taking place. This isn’t Sen. Whitehouse’s first ethical scandal either. When he was first a senator, he sought ...

Fox News: In 2021, the Center for Biological Diversity — an influential environmental group with assets exceeding $40 million that advocates for stringent federal wildlife protections — sued the federal government over a Trump administration rule expanding hunting and fishing on 2.3 million acres across 147 wildlife refuges and national fish hatcheries. Instead of defending the rule, the Biden administration asked the court to delay proceedings in the case in February 2022, and in November agreed to a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity that stipulated the government would take wide-ranging steps to protect wildlife "harmed by expanded hunting and fishing" on national wildlife refuges. Under the settlement, the FWS promised to expand lead ammunition prohibitions across various refuges beginning in 2026 as part of the 2023-2024 annual rule expected to be proposed in May. The 2022-2023 rule finalized in September had only banned lead ammunition throughout the ...

 Fox News: European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment Farmers party opposes Netherlands government's plans to buy farms, limit livestock A young Dutch political party seeking to push back on the government's climate agenda achieved a stunning victory Wednesday as it won the most seats for a single party in the Dutch Senate . "This isn't normal, but actually it is! It's all normal citizens who voted," party leader Caroline van der Plas said. "But today people have shown they can't stay at home any longer. We won't be ignored anymore." The Farmer-Citizen Movement Party, known as BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) in Dutch, built its victory on the back of protests against the government’s environmental policies , which aim to slash nitrogen emissions by dramatically cutting back on livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms. Nitrate and ammonia pollution significantly impacts biodiversity, particularly air and wa...

 Stephen Moore: For at least the last 20 years, politicians in Washington, at the behest of green energy groups, have spent some $100 billion of taxpayer money to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going for us so far? A recent Associated Press story, based on the latest data on global carbon emissions, provides a pretty accurate report card: "Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached a Record High in 2022." The article tells us: "Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power. Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)" You've go...

 National Review: The headlines were dire: “Half of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals have been killed by climate change,” CBS News reported in October 2020. Bleaching of the reef’s corals is “getting more widespread,” the New York Times reported earlier that year. A Vice headline in 2017 promoting David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary said, “the Great Barrier Reef will die this century,” while National Geographic predicted an earlier demise for reefs around the globe: “Coral reefs could be gone in 30 years.” It became almost common knowledge that the Great Barrier Reef was assuredly doomed, the victim of a warming climate, rising ocean temperatures, and increasingly acidic water. Then, in early August, the authoritative Australian Institute of Marine Science released a new report on the 1,400-mile natural wonder. Two-thirds of the reef — its northern and central regions — are showing record levels of coral cover. The southern region is also showing high levels of cora...

 Washington Examiner: ... The Senate passed a resolution last week that would preserve part of President Donald Trump's commonsense permitting reform. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) crossed party lines to vote with Republicans. All other Democratic senators voted to keep President Joe Biden’s job-killing rollback of permitting regulation to what it was in Obama's time. "For years I’ve worked to fix our broken permitting system and I know the administration’s approach to permitting is dead wrong,” Manchin said. “Today’s vote to repeal these burdensome NEPA rules is a step in the right direction. But unfortunately this legislation is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives.” When Manchin says “NEPA,” he is referring to the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, which empowers environmental activists to go to federal court to stop any infrastructure project that receives a single dime of federal money. These lawsuits can take years, causing unnecessary delays and driving up...

 Holman Jenkins: Lies told by government officials provoke little concern from the public until voters encounter a consequence: That mask or vaccine didn’t prevent you from being infected by Covid. You can’t keep your doctor. The half-trillion dollars you were asked to spend on climate change didn’t stop climate change. Take the Joe Manchin-sponsored climate compromise coming together in the U.S. Senate. Despite panegyrics in the press, this euphoric proposal amounts to exactly the sort of subsidy regime the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, after a similar splurge, judged to be a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.” One analysis pinpointed in the fewest possible words why: “Alternative energy is not replacement energy.” Such packages are sold on the public’s faulty intuition that an erg of green energy consumed is an erg of fossil energy that stays in the ground. But it does not follow. The most widely celebrated paper in recent ...

 Andrea Widburg: Environment, Social, and Governance, better known as ESG, is a metric that measures whether a nation or corporation can demonstrate the maximum amount of corporate virtue-signaling.  The most striking example is Sri Lanka, the former government of which massively increased its ESG by mandating only organic fertilizer in the small nation, leading to massive inflation, famine, and the violent overthrow of its government.  ESG is bad business and, as Sri Lanka demonstrates, dangerous to human well-being.  Now Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that Florida is leading the way to stand against this utterly toxic metric. For just one example of the mindless gobbledygook behind ESG, take a gander at  this recent write-up  from Kyle Peterdy at  CFI , which is an accredited provider of online content for finance professionals (that is, it's teaching this crap to the next generation): ESG is an acronym for  E nvironmental,...

 Clarice Feldman: ... Why is Black Rock’s position on ESG so significant ? And what was its reason for switching from tested investment policies to untested, subjective elements not subject to empirical analysis? Heartland offers an explanation—it was a profitable strategy for Black Rock and one in accord with its founder’s political beliefs that investors can force top-down social policies which they favor, without being accountable for their failures. ... For a while the emphasis on this new investment strategy worked for Black Rock, drawing in clients. And then it didn’t. In six months in lost $1.7 trillion dollars of client funds This is the largest amount of money ever lost by a single firm over a six-month period. ... Given this example and the irrational nexus between ESG weighting and performance I think the hyping by Black Rock and others of their novel ESG investing strategy was both a marketing ploy to attract virtue-signaling asset managers and a means to enable trustee...

 Steven Heyward: I suggest these two news stories are related: Global 2021 coal-fired electricity generation surges to record high ...   And for the delicious chaser: ESG Fund Closures Pile Up as Do-Good Investing Takes Back Seat ...  In the real world teh environmentalist have bumped into the road block of reality. 

 Washington Examiner: E nvironmental, Social, and Governance, known widely as ESG, is a concept in finance that essentially uses "wokeness" as a measure of a company's value or worthiness of investment. Thus, it is a form of financial malpractice. It is fundamentally dishonest to misrepresent a company's financial soundness by subordinating financial considerations to political judgments and end-of-the-world superstitions. But since corporate leaders may not be convinced based on what's honest, here it is in the language they might understand: It could get you sued, and it could become very expensive. This week, Utah began the much-needed pushback against the use of ESG principles by the financial analysts who look at the state's bonds. Gov. Spencer Cox and other state officials, incensed by low and apparently arbitrary ESG ratings, wrote a letter to ratings agency Standard & Poors demanding that the ratings be rescinded. They demanded specific answers to ...

  Daily Caller: Biden Admin Stalls Natural Gas Pipeline At The Behest Of Environmental Activists ... The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recommended that the USACE rescind the permit after two environmental groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Kentucky Resources Council, threatened to file a lawsuit over the project. The groups sent a 60-day notice of intent (NOI) to sue for alleged violations of the ESA to the Department of the Interior, FWS and USACE on Feb. 28. The two environmental groups argued that pipeline construction would disturb Indiana bats, gray bats and northern long-eared bats which they said live in underground caves along the proposed route. The FWS has classified Indiana and gray bats as endangered for decades and recently proposed to also list the northern long-eared bat as endangered. (RELATED: Biden Admin’s Own Study Confirms The Worst About The Left’s Climate Agenda) ... The climate kooks appear to have bats in their belfry.  Environmental...

  Epoch Times: ‘When You Think ESG, You Should Be Thinking CCP’: Peter Thiel In his keynote address to the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, venture capitalist Peter Thiel said environmental, social, and corporate governance ( ESG ) is “perhaps the real enemy” of the cryptocurrency, likening the movement to the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ). ... ESG is an attempt to use corporate governance to advance the environmental wacko agenda.   

 Jeffrey Folks: Recently, Molly Taft at Gizmodo  proclaimed , "California's Epic Snowstorms Are Great News."  Great  news, indeed, with snowfall running some 150%  above normal  for the Sierra Nevadas, or "200% of average for snow water equivalent." For years, climate alarmists bemoaned the multiyear drought that, they insisted, would utterly "destroy" California.  The drought, they wrote, was the product of global warming and was thus more or less permanent.  Say goodbye to California agriculture; life in California cities; and, eventually, life on Earth. Those claims were false, as this year's massive Sierra snow-pack shows.  When the snow melts in the spring, that water will fill the reservoirs, irrigate the crops, and help fulfill the needs of California cities.  Even before the strong start to this year's snowfall, the 2012–2016 drought had begun to abate.  If the snowfall continues through th...

 Epoch Times: Billion-Dollar Network Is Playing Politics in America’s Energy Sector, Driving up Costs: Ken Braun   Environmental groups and advocates are spending billions of dollars every year playing  politics  with America’s energy sector while simultaneously driving up energy costs for Americans, according to Ken Braun, the senior investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center. ... These people are over-stating the danger to the earth from the energy business and are a danger to US national security. 

 Breitbart: ... “The concerns of farmers and ranchers are escalating regarding the intent of the 30×30 goal, the definition of conservation, and the metrics for defining success, among other things,” Duvall wrote. “We urge you to move swiftly to provide clarity about your intentions for the initiative, and when you do so, it will be important for you to invite public comment because farmers and ranchers are leaders in conservation and deserve to have their voices heard.” But if not moving swiftly the Biden Administration is again focusing on the order. Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR)  reported  on what it described as Biden’s effort “to slow the collapse of nature.” ... But Republican Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts spoke out against the plan when Biden put it in an executive order. “We do need to watch any sort of federal legislation because the President doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do this. He will have to work through the congress,” Ricketts ...