Catch the left violating their own 'book of rules' in the climate debate

If those of us who do not believe in the so-called "climate emergency" are to win the day, we need to take a page out of Rules for Radicals – A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Written in 1971 by Chicago-based community organizer Saul D. Alinsky Rules for Radicals included the crucially important Rule #4:

Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

As discussed in part 1 of this series, progressives say that their "book of rules" includes basing their assertions on the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But alarmists' fears about increasing floods, extreme rainfall, heat waves, intense storms and forest fires are, in fact, not supported by the UN IPCC. So, making them live up to their own rules, we need to call them on this every time.

I also discussed how we must hold leftists to their own book of rules when it comes to social justice, especially caring for the poor, the elderly and those who are disadvantaged in society. We do this by pointing out that, of the $1.27 trillion USD spent on climate finance in 2022/2023, only a paltry 5% went exclusively to helping poor people adapt to climate change, however caused, a clear social justice violation. Similarly, progressives need to be held to account for the violations in social justice that occur as a result of:

• the huge increase in electricity rates that is the natural result of the transition to wind and solar power, which hurts the poor and those on fixed incomes the most
• the diversion of food crops to the production of biofuels, causing food shortages and soaring prices
• the human rights abuses in developing countries that accompany the production of electric vehicle batteries as well as wind and solar power equipment
• The ruining of well water on farms in the vicinity of wind turbines.

Another item in climate alarmists' "book of rules" is the requirement that they are helping protect the environment and wildlife when they promote wind and solar power and grid-scale Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). Yet nothing could be further from the truth and we should hold them to account for this in public meetings, etc.

In their 2021 book, Clean' Energy Exploitations: Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support 'Clean' Energy authors Ronald Stein and Todd Royal explain:

Green energy uses materials from some of the worst ecological and human rights offenders that exist on Earth… The volume of wind turbine waste is projected to soar in years to come, with mining and manufacturing waste, service waste, and end-of-life waste being the major sources. It is estimated that there will be 43 million metric tons just of [wind turbine] blade waste worldwide by 2050.

Lithium ion-based batteries used in BESS systems rely on a mix of materials that require massive amounts of energy to mine, transport, process and refine, far greater than the extraction and transport of oil and natural gas. Consequently, while batteries are often portrayed by manufacturers as generating no greenhouse gases, even the left-leaning Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has pointed out that: "Mining and processing the minerals, plus the battery manufacturing process, involve substantial emissions of carbon".

The CBC cites Jennifer Dunn at Northwestern University's Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience, who explained: "The material that helps power the battery is produced from a number of different metals, things like nickel and cobalt and lithium." And of course, China controls most of the lithium and cobalt, which are often produced with no environmental standards, and often employ child labor and near-slave labor and follow practically no health and safety safeguards. University of Houston Professor Larry Bell reports ("China Targets US Weakness for Afghan Rare Earths, Taiwan Chips," America out Loud, September 25, 2021):

China has amassed stunning control over 70% of the world's lithium supplies and 85% of rare earths supply chains to dominate global industries and jobs that depend on them.