Sustainability Guru George Heartwell Speaks in Ludington

[XLFD]

Late last year, the Ludington Torch made light of former Grand Rapids mayor George Heartwell for forecasting 100% green energy for the City of GR and wanting open borders for unvetted Muslim refugees despite the recent terror attacks that occurred in Paris that week.  Frankly, the first was economically unattainable and unsustainable, and the last was just plain reckless.  But he brought his wisdom to Ludington then to spread his messages on sustainability, resiliency and all those other buzzwords to the Amen corner of Ludington represented by AFFEW (A Few Friends of the Environment and the World) and several officials for the county and City of Ludington.

On Thursday, June 2, 2016 he was scheduled to talk with AFFEW in the Community Room in the City Hall basement at 7:00 PM, and I decided to try and catch it.  He had spoken to the Rotary Club and others earlier in the day at noon, and has spoken at other venues about what he would cover tonight in his post-mayor quest to make West Michigan more sustainable.  In reviewing this article, I found a more formal setting where Mr. Heartwell said effectively the same things he said this night in roughly the same amount of time, you can get just about everything he commented on (other than the Q&A session he had thereafter) at this meeting in Ludington.  This February speech had the same template and much of the speech was verbatim of it.

If you have read my other articles and comments on Mayor Heartwell, you rightly may have guessed that I am not impressed with his philosophy and believe it has little to do with reality.  So why would I go to this seminar? 

I would liken it to visiting a church that is of a different type than your regular church.  You come to learn about their ethos, compare your own, observe the believers and the preachers, and ultimately decide whether their faith is better than yours.   

The meeting in the Community Room this night could have easily been compared to a religious gathering in its own right.  Former Mayor Heartwell is an ordained minister for the United Church of Christ, and served for 14 years at Heartside Ministry in GR.  He displayed the acumen of a minister/career politician in his speaking, and the topics he was speaking on was the bread and butter of the majority of the AFFEWers and otherwise progressive crowd.  Many were hanging on his words devoutly, and would have likely said "Amen" if that was the protocol.

I didn't recognize any other 'media' outlets represented, but some notable attendees were Ludington Mayor (pro tem) Kaye Holman, Councilor Kathy Winczewski, County Administrator Fabian Knizacky, several members of the county and city planning commissions, and a variety of AFFEW members including their President Julie Chambers who introduced the former mayor of Grand Rapids who has went on to become the 'Sustainability Coordinator' for Grand Valley State University (GVSU) since his  forced mayoral retirement at the beginning of the year.

Having arrived early, I found a seat in the back, and was prepping another article when I was introduced to Mr. Heartwell by Councilor Winczewski and we exchanged pleasantries and positive biographical data about each other.  Having responsibly attended several other meetings regarding Resilient Ludington, a concept I found mostly ridiculous, Councilor Moonbeam perhaps wanted to make sure I wasn't going to try and kidnap away the focus of the meeting from what was planned.

But when one is visiting a sacred church of sustainability, that would just be plain rude to do so.  For the record, I took voluminous notes through the speech and Q&A period, snacked on some of the healthy food placed out, and left quietly about 70 minutes later. 

Because the video above covers most of what his dedicated speech did, I shall only proffer a summary, since you may not desire to watch the long video.  He talked of the December 2015 Paris Climate Accords and the COP 21 Agreement, this non-binding agreement between 196 nations of the world had the three goals of:

(a) Holding the increase in the global average temperature to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels,

b) Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production,

(c) Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development [i.e. developed countries footing the bill for developing countries resiliency efforts].

Heartwell was one of 600 mayors that attended the meetings (37 from the USA), and indicated he had advocated for much stronger policy and more binding effects.  He regretfully told the mostly sympathetic crowd that most of those concessions were dropped by the attending diplomats and nation leaders. 

Without endorsing the religion, Heartwell quoted quoted the current Pope on climate change:  "What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?"  This and other rallying cries were among his calls to action for creating a sustainability network in the Mason County area.

Six such networks already exist in West Michigan according to Mr. Heartwell, in Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Holland, Grand Haven, Benton Harbor/St. Joe, and Kalamazoo.  He labelled this as an impressive accomplishment, given that many of the communities are mostly conservative in their politics.

Heartwell found great fault with the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision, presumably because it would prevent the accords being put into law once more citizens understand what the consequences of various 'sustainability' policies would entail.  He had nothing but praise for Catherine McKenna of Canada who said Canada would do whatever it took to get to the "less than 1.5 degree Celsius" goal just a month after she was appointed as a minister of environment and climate change by the liberal Canadian president.

During the question and answer period he related the story of a fishing trip he made to the upper peninsula where he talked to the lake, the trees, an eagle, etc. all telling him about issues of sustainability.  

The admissions made me worry a little about his overall sanity, but it seemed to warm the hearts of the empathetic crowd, where a significant portion would probably say a Christian who admits they speak with God would be off-their-rocker.

But it was just a good reminder that the claims that George Heartwell made throughout his presentation were equally fantastic.  He claimed that 2015 was the hottest year on record, recall that in Mason County we had the coldest February on record that year.  Local anecdote aside, however, Forbes believably reports that it wasn't even close and such loose rhetoric by Heartwell reduces any sort of credibility for the rest of his words.  He followed this with an even more absurd and easily refutable claim that 14 of the last 15 years were the hottest on record-- and maybe they were if you only go back 16 years for the records!

And yet the content and tenor of the comments and questions by the audience before, during, and after the symposium that night, would lend one to believe that the orator was well-received, respected, and credible to them, and that AFFEW and other public officers of the area will likely work towards the goal of making a regional sustainability network . 

What they are indirectly working for, however, are ways to put in more governmental controls over individual rights that needn't be taken away to make our planet more sustainable or resilient.  Often freedom and liberty can be the best methods to achieve that goal.  Consider the nations that have the worst air pollution...

... have the most governmental controls you can imagine.  This top ten list is littered with absolute monarchs (dictatorships) and Islamic hellholes and fails to have a Christian or First World nation among them.  When you get to water pollution, the top ten list has similar characteristics. 

The problem with good-intentioned people like George Heartwell and AFFEW members is that they believe that government authority can plan and solve every problem, and that they believe the myth of global warming helps in accomplishing that goal, since the world is effectively having to deal with a 'common enemy'.  How better to do so than come under the rule of one benevolent government?

History tells us over and over again that such thinking is as silly as talking to inanimate natural objects and eagles in the U.P. 

The sorriest thing about this meeting, alas, was what was not brought up for discussion.  We have high blood lead levels in our young kids, we have high concentrations of metal pollutants, PAHs, and PCBs in the Pere Marquette Lake, we have had a city which covertly went without a discharge permit for its water plant for five years, and is now admittedly putting out toxic gases (hydrogen sulfide) into our breathing air. 

Our leaders are lying about the problems, they undoubtedly play a large part in each of the problems mentioned.  But nary a word by our leaders, AFFEW, or green former Mayor George Heartwell about that.  Dissent is not sustainable when authorities and media completely ignore it.  Or is it? 

[shinblind]

Good job of reporting X.

Maybe they should have considered holding the meeting under a tent outdoors. If you are going to preach environmental religion you should at least have the common courtesy  to honor the revival meting tradition, old Georgie being a former minister and all.

Why in the hell anyone living this far North would give a damn about global warming is beyond me.

Bring on the HEAT.

And how sustainable can your lifestyle be locally when you have a 5 month growing season? Hibernation as a viable option? Migration works outs for some but that is not being a true believer in sustainability. 

The climate change acceptors are a brain washed lot.

And seeing AFFEW cower behind their useless battery barrels while ignoring the local toxic PM Bayou issue, high lead (Pb) levels or even the stench from the WWTP seems to be the best they can do.

[Brad]

Yea great job X.

And to "preacher" Shinblind... AMEN!

Maybe we can spray some scented aerosol outside and increase our global warming and mask the Stench at the same time..?

[XLFD]

Be sure and check out the 'Amen Corner' in the COLDNews today; they apparently squeezed one of their new reporters into the audience who had a different take than me.

One good thing I learned this evening was that my attention span is sustainable for around an hour or so.

[Willy]

Another great article X. What burns my rear regarding these greenie weenies is their total ignorance about the Communistic agenda behind the climate change debacle. Imagine all of these hypocrites telling the rest of the World how to survive, what to eat, where to live, how to live, etc. when the bunch of them continue to live like everyone else. How many meeting goers walked to the meeting? Did they turn off the lights at the meeting in order to help save the planet? I suggests they sell their cars, live underground and use the Earth for heat, eat food grown without the use of any fossil fuels, disconnect their homes from the electrical grid and stop breathing to prevent their CO from entering the atmosphere. This joker Heartwell uses more energy transporting himself to these self indulgent meetings than any ordinary citizen uses all year. We will be having an electrical shortage problem soon when a large number of coal powered electrical plants go off line by orders from the EPA. These greenie weenie idiots will help bring America to it's knees.

Power plant closures ordered by the EPA

[XLFD]

Thank, Willy, the meetings of quasi-environmentalists and global warming acolytes is always ripe for amusement and the germ of a good article showing how they use fog and mirrors (and faulty science/data) to deceive. 

An article I noticed yesterday on Grand Rapids caught my eye.  It seems the comptroller of GR is notifying the city leaders that the proposed budget is... unsustainable.  George Heartwell left GR with a billion dollar deficit at the end of this last year.  If that sounds like a big number for a city of under 200,000 people, it's because it is.  Even with plenty of help from friendly state and federal grants helping out his sustainability experiments, every Grand Rapidian has around $6000 debt courtesy of their local government.  Progressive sustainability comes at a dear cost.

Cities that run deficits can't print more money like the feds, that debt is placed on the backs of the citizens through higher fees, utility rates and taxes.  Next time I go to one of Heartwell's symposium, I'll have to prepare a couple of questions about economic sustainability and resilience.

[Willy]

X, I wonder if that billion dollar amount is a misprint. I can't understand how a City like Grand Rapids could possibly be so down under. It seems that this would be a major story because of all of the city bailouts that are taking place, especially seeing that we are now going to subsidize Detroit's schools to the tune of 700+ million tax payer dollars. Why in the World would Grand Rapids be in the business of creating affordable housing. Liberal governance just can't leave free market enterprise alone.

[XLFD]

The figure for the Grand Rapids debt was a campaign issue last year, with one of the losing candidates pointing out that it was over a billion, and the current mayor arguing it was around half a billion.  With a comptroller claiming the billion plus mark, you can believe that Heartwell's successes were very dependent on spending in the red.  When our progressive friends talk about sustainability, they seem to throw out economics, believing governments have an endless supply of money if they want it. 

[shinblind]

Huh????

"According to its website, www.affew.org, AFFEW “provides visitors and residents with information regarding environmental issues having local importance by promoting public awareness, hosting balanced discussions, providing referral to other organizations, and sponsoring activities which promote a healthier ecosystem.”

LOL  AFFEW, what a joke.

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Big Brother is watching you." George Orwell

AFFEW,just one the local poster boys for universal deceit.

"There has to be a‘collective interest with triple bottom-line goals. You have to look at the

whole picture.’" from George Heartwell I presume? from the COLDs column.

It didn't take long for the new COLDs reporter to sell his soul for a hand full of universal deceit.

Good job Mitch you indoctrination is almost complete. Your Ludingtonizantion is progressing nicely. Soon you will be Ludingtonized.

"“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”  Orwell again.

Did they serve anything else besides asparagus sticks and water?  Anything else wouldn't be locally sourced this time of year.  I guess House of Flavors ice cream would be allowable. They seem to have the sustainable stench catagory covered.

[XLFD]

George Heartwell, meet George Orwell.  They served vegetables, apple juice, crackers, cheeses, not very sustainable over the long run, but that's par for the rest of the menu too.

AFFEW has too much involved with the ingrained politics of the area to do anything meaningful other than shill for them; AFFEW officer Mrs. Begnoche assuredly instructed Mitch how to best write up this story.  The COLDNews crew showed up at the noontime meeting, and reported on that, which explains why the storyline you'll read there seems a lot different than my recollections of the evening meeting.