What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? - Wikipedia - ""What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" is a cartoon by Joel Pett featuring an attendee at a climate summit arguing against addressing global warming in the face of the many environmental benefits."
Meme - "CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL US ALL, WE NEED TO DISMANTLE OUR SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM TO PREVENT IT!"
"HOW ABOUT NUCLEAR POWER?"
"I DON'T WANT NUCLEAR POWER! I WANT TO WANT DISMANTLE OUR SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM"
They've basically admitted it after all
Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up? - WSJ - "James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.” With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly... Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000. Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago. What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions. As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain. Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious. The problem with Mr. Hansen’s models—and the U.N.’s—is that they don’t consider more-precise measures of how aerosol emissions counter warming caused by greenhouse gases. Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures. The most recent of these was published in April by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry in the Journal of Climate, a reliably mainstream journal. These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made? On the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s galvanizing testimony, it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policy makers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures. That would be a lukewarm policy, consistent with a lukewarming planet."
So much for listening to scientists
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises
Liberals mock the cognitive dissonance of doomsday cults in the face of failed apocalyptic predictions, but double down on failed apocalyptic environmental predictions
Exclusive: Sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg on 50 years of misguided climate panic - "Almost every climate summit has been branded as the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have continually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out. This message is spectacularly wrong and leads to panic and poor policies. Three years ago, Prince Charles announced we had just 18 months left to fix climate change. This wasn’t his first attempt at deadline-setting. Ten years earlier, he told an audience that he “had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.” In 2004, The Observer told us that without drastic action, climate change would destroy civilization by 2020. It stated that major European cities would be sunk beneath rising seas, Britain would be plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate, and mega-droughts and famines would lead to widespread rioting and nuclear war. In 1989, the head of the United Nations’ Environment Program declared we had just three years to “win — or lose — the climate struggle.” In 1982, the UN was predicting planetary “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. At the first UN environment summit in Stockholm in 1972, the organizer and later first UN Environment Program director warned that the world had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe. In 1972, the world was also rocked by the first global environmental scare, the so-called “Limits to Growth” report. The authors predicted that most natural resources would run out within a few decades while pollution would overpower humanity. At the time, the future was described by Time magazine as a desolate world with few gaunt survivors tilling freeway center strips, hoping to raise a subsistence crop. Life magazine expected “urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution” by the mid-1980s. They were all wrong because they overlooked the greatest resource of all: human ingenuity. We don’t just use up resources; we innovate smarter ways of making resources more available. At the same time, technology solves many of the most persistent pollution problems, as did the catalytic converter. This is why air pollution in rich countries has been declining for decades. Nonetheless, after fifty years of stunningly incorrect predictions, climate campaigners, journalists and politicians still hawk an immediate apocalypse to great acclaim by ignoring adaptation. Headlines that sea level rise could drown 187 million people by the end of the century are foolish. They imagine that hundreds of millions of people will remain stationary while the waters lap over their calves, hips, chests and mouths. More seriously, it absurdly assumes that no nation will build any sea defenses. In the real world, ever-wealthier nations will adapt and protect their citizens better, leading to less flooding, while surprisingly spending an ever-lower share of their GDP on flood and protection costs. Likewise, when activists tell you that climate change will make children face twice as much fire, they rely on computer models that only include temperature and ignore humans. Real societies adapt and reduce fire because fires are costly. That is why global fire statistics show less burned area over the past 120 years and why a future with adaptation sees less, not more fire. These unsubstantiated scares have real-world consequences. An academic study of young people worldwide found that most suffer from ‘eco-anxiety’. Two-thirds are scared and sad, while almost half say their worries impact their daily lives. It is irresponsible to scare youths when the UN Climate Panel finds that even if we do nothing to mitigate climate change, the impact by the end of the century will be a reduction of an average income increase from 450 percent to 438 percent. A problem, but hardly the end of the world. Moreover, panic is a terrible policy advisor. Activist politicians in the rich world are tinkering around the edges of addressing climate change, showering subsidies over expensive vanity projects such as electric cars, solar and wind, while the UN finds that it can’t identify an actual impact on emissions from the last decade of climate promulgations. Despite their grandiose statements of saving the world, 78 percent of rich countries’ energy still comes from fossil fuels. And as the Glasgow climate summit has shown (for the 26th time), developing nations – whose emissions over the rest of this century matter most – cannot afford to similarly spend trillions on ineffective climate policies as they help their populations escape poverty. Fifty years of panic clearly haven’t solved climate change. We need a smarter approach that doesn’t scare everyone and focuses on realistic solutions such as adaptation and innovation."
To Fight Climate Change, Get Real - "In the weeks since the election, prominent philanthropists, activists and scholars have insisted that climate voters have given the Biden administration a “mandate,” that low-income communities of color are the strongest proponents of climate action, and that, contradictorily, more resources need to be invested in communications and organizing within those communities to convince them of the necessity of climate action. In reality, the preconditions for politically viable and sustainable climate action have always pointed in the opposite direction. The balance of power in American politics is held by rural and industrial states with energy intensive and resource-based economies. Those states tend to be culturally hostile and economically vulnerable to the regulatory and pricing agenda that the environmental community remains doggedly committed to, and Democrats can’t win or sustain governing majorities without them. As such, there is no path to significant U.S. climate action that is predicated upon routing these areas politically, and thereby moving the nation away from fossil fuels via brute-force regulations, mandates and taxation. This has been the case since climate issues first emerged in the late 1980s, and it remains so today. A more pragmatic environmental movement would have long ago come to terms with these realities... [pragmatic] steps won’t satisfy much of the environmental community, which continues to view the issue in Manichean terms... Hitching the future of the climate to the political fortunes of one party—particularly one increasingly centered around Americans who work in the knowledge economy, live in coastal cities, and won’t bear the lion’s share of the costs associated with cutting emissions—was never a good idea."
Opinion | Climate change is not an ‘existential threat’ - The Washington Post - "At the Glasgow climate conference, President Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” No, it’s not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity can live with... estimates that climate change will increase deaths from malnutrition. (The World Health Organization, for example, predicts 95,000 more deaths due to child malnutrition by 2030.) That is true, he says. But it is also true that malnutrition has plummeted over the past three decades, and is expected to continue plummeting in the next three. “In 1990, 7 million children died from malnutrition,” Lomborg says. “Today we’re down to about 2.7 million children dying from malnutrition. And in 2050 … we’ll be down to about 600,000.” Why? Dramatic reductions in global poverty. “It’s really not rocket science,” he tells me. “If you’re poor, you’re much more likely to be malnourished and also die from malnourishment. If you get people out of poverty, they don’t die from malnutrition anymore.” Climate change doesn’t reverse this progress against deaths from malnutrition, Lomborg argues, “it makes progress go slightly less fast.” But if the Glasgow climate conference leads to the adoption of much stronger climate measures, he says, that will slow development. A global carbon tax, for example, could increase the number of people in poverty around the world by as much as 80 million, causing far more malnutrition deaths than climate change... What about temperature-related deaths? It is true, Lomborg says, that we are seeing more heat waves today, but we are also seeing fewer cold waves. According a recent study in the Lancet, over the past two decades, there were 490,000 heat-related deaths worldwide, compared to 4.6 million cold-related deaths. While about 116,000 more people died from heat last year because of climate change, roughly 283,000 fewer people died from cold — which, he calculates, means global warming saved about 166,000 thousands of lives... according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , “the impact of climate change is equivalent to 2.6 percent of GDP by the end of the century. Instead of being 450 percent as rich in 2100, we’ll ‘only’ be 434 percent as rich.” By contrast, he says, a Nature study finds that even if we fall short of Biden’s plan for net-zero American carbon emissions by 2050, and reduce emissions by 95 percent, we would end up losing 11.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product — or $11,300 per person per year — to avert a 2.6 percent loss in global GDP. The way to address climate change is to unleash the free market to increase prosperity and innovation. But climate alarmists are using false claims of doom to scare people into adopting policies that will have the opposite effect — destroying economic growth and increasing global poverty. That makes no sense. The first step to rational solutions is to push back on the panic and recognize that Biden is wrong — climate change does not threaten human existence."
Facebook, other tech giants censor facts about climate change - "Here’s something Facebook’s censors deemed unacceptable: I wrote a comment using the latest peer-reviewed research from the medical journal Lancet on deaths caused by heat and cold... I ran afoul of Facebook’s fact-checkers for noting that over the past 20 years, our higher temperatures, which we would expect from global warming, have increased heat deaths and decreased cold deaths. I calculated the net effect in terms of saved lives every year and was flagged for “misinformation.” To avoid social-media censorship of this article, I bizarrely have to cite one of the study’s lead authors instead of putting it in my own words... By labeling this evidence “misinformation,” Facebook suppresses crucial facts that could help us identify the best policies to reduce future heat and cold deaths while reining in global warming effectively — which surely should be the goal. Another example of censorship occurred when I wrote on electric vehicles. A recent Nature article reaffirms that electric cars emit less CO₂ than conventional cars. Unfortunately, large batteries also make electric cars much heavier, and heavier cars are more likely to kill the occupants of other vehicles in traffic accidents. The Nature piece weighed the benefit from less CO₂ against more accident deaths. It found that the climate benefits outweigh accident costs in countries with very green energy, like Norway and Canada, but not in less-green countries like America, Germany, Japan, China and India. This is an interesting study. Facebook flagged me when I noted the authors had curiously measured CO₂ benefits at $150 per ton — higher than almost any country prices any (let alone all) emissions. The current average global price is $2 per ton. At any realistic price — or even at the still-sky-high price of $100 — the study would show traffic-death costs outweigh climate benefits everywhere. How this point is “misinformation” is extremely difficult to fathom. The inevitable conclusion is that it did not fit an acceptable narrative to reveal that even if the entire world had 100% clean energy, electric-vehicle climate benefits would be outweighed by additional traffic deaths. Disturbingly, Facebook’s vice president has admitted fact-checkers are not necessarily objective, and the company even acknowledged recently in a lawsuit that fact-check tags are “opinion,” not factual assertions. That certainly fits my own experience. Yet some activists want even more censorship. They’ve praised researchers for inventing an artificial-intelligence tool allowing social-media platforms to delete climate-change “misinformation” in real time. Absurdly, the AI tool has such a narrow view of acceptability that many mainstream scientific findings would be deleted. Tellingly, all this censorship is focused on one side: Activists can claim climate-change effects are far worse than they really are, with little or no suppression. In other words: Inconvenient facts get blocked, but convenient mistruths and exaggerations thrive. This is disturbing above all because it makes identifying good policies harder. Bank of America has found current global action to achieve net-zero emissions will cost the world $5 trillion every year for the next three decades — more than all nations and households spend on education every year."
Peer reviewed research is "misinformation" when it threatens the liberal agenda
Quis custodiet ipsos fact chuckers? - "We cannot help feeling flattered that the mighty fact-checkers at AFP have come after us because “A video viewed tens of thousands of times on social media claims that satellite data showed no net global warming for the past seven years”, which they admit is true then X out lest it lead to unauthorized thoughts. Fact-checked for telling no lies. We made the big time. Now if we could just get Greta Thunberg to denounce us for telling inconvenient truths."
Water Wars: Wind Turbine Construction Destroying Underground Water Supplies in Ontario - "Pundits have predicted that the next major war will be sparked over water. In Ontario just such a battle is (pardon the pun) well underway."
There's a battle over your gas stove, climate change and health - "the beloved gas stove has become a focal point in a fight over whether gas should even exist in the 35% of U.S. homes that cook with it... The focus on possible health risks from stoves is part of the broader campaign by environmentalists to kick gas out of buildings to fight climate change. Commercial and residential buildings account for about 13% of heat-trapping emissions, mainly from the use of gas appliances. Those groups won a significant victory recently when California developed new standards that, once finalized, will require more ventilation for gas stoves than for electric ones starting in 2023. The Biden administration's climate plan also calls for government incentives that would encourage people to switch from residential gas to all-electric... The gas utility industry is fighting to preserve its business by downplaying existing science on gas stoves and indoor air quality. It points out that federal regulators have declined to regulate gas stoves more stringently. And it is investing in a range of campaigns to remind customers that cooking with gas is cheaper."
Maybe playing the race card can work here - Asian food should be cooked with a real flame. Then again, Asians are "white-adjacent" so they're evil
Liberals raising the cost of living as usual
Rex Murphy: Why is it Canada's 'duty' to destroy its economy and Confederation in the pursuit of net zero? - "Having a secure and tested energy system is a very big deal for any nation, but having a secure and tested energy supply is the quintessential necessity for a vast northern country — really vast — that is also the home of a wealthy, modern economy. A subsidiary question is: Does the government of a Confederation have the right, the legislative competence to declare the central industry of one of the provinces within that Confederation outmoded? And on that premise make it a national policy to destroy the economic well-being of that province?... Is it really acceptable in our Confederation to single out one province to bear the majority weight and economic devastation of this “fight?” The real and overriding question, however, is why does Canada, or more accurately, why does the government of Canada profess we have a “duty” to the world to work towards eradicating the energy supply and system that we already have, that has mostly served us well, that has brought fortune and security to the nation? Why is the energy future of Canada under the ethos and edicts of the United Nations’ IPCC?... The global-warming obsession of this current government is the most absurd and senseless fixation of any government since Sir John A. set us up as a country. The greatest part of that absurdity is how easily all bend to it, all speak the pious words of “net zero” as if they were summoning a genie, as our deluded leaders prate in foreign capitals about the brave new world they are about to call into being. The same leaders who can’t manage a payroll system, dig a few wells and provide clean water, who shut down Parliament but party abroad with maskless faces laughing at jokes — of which I suspect we are the butt. They do not have the intellectual competence to engineer this “transition.” As a minority government they do not have the mandate either. Yet witness the ease with which the press, academia and all who might be regarded as “thought leaders” — a dubious category at the best of times, but dismal at the present — are all abundantly, fervidly on board."
Opinion: Net-zero won't cure the climate but it may kill Canada - "the federal government introduced its Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, which establishes our pathway towards reaching that goal by 2050. But don’t hold your breath. It took a full decade to build 12.5 km of electric light rail in Ottawa, arguably the largest green-energy project in Canada over that time. To electrify the rest of Canada’s transportation sector in three decades, as well as our industrial and domestic energy sectors, the new Act starts by convening an advisory board to consult with Canadians on the best pathways to this target . . . tick tock. Natural Resources Canada says Canadian electrical use is 600 terawatt hours (TWh or trillion watt-hours) annually. What few recognize, however, is that we are already over 80 per cent green with respect to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This is primarily due to our abundance of hydro and nuclear power. Nuclear is arguably our greenest source of electricity. It produces essentially no CO2; it has by far the best safety record; and we know how to safely manage nuclear waste. As for wind, despite massive subsidies it currently contributes only four per cent to our grid. It remains intermittent, off-peak and low-grade electricity, only marginally better than solar. The challenge for net-zero, however, is not greening the remaining 20 per cent of the 600 TWh of electricity that we use. It is the 9700 petaJoules (equivalent to two billion barrels) of oil and gas we burn every year for transportation, industry and heating. Converting this to electrical would require 2000 TWh per year — more than three times our current annual use of electricity. Quite apart from the challenge of electrifying transportation, industry and heating, is a three-fold increase in our green electrical generating capacity even possible?... Germany favours wind but has learned that its inconsistency requires baseload backup with coal-fired thermal plants. In Canada, net-zero with wind would require upwards of 300,000 turbines, or 50 times more than we have now, plus an extensive distribution network for this decentralized system, plus an equivalent thermal generation backup (unless we resolve to drive and heat our homes only on windy days)... Offsets by planting trees (also planned in the Mid-Century Strategy) are an illusion once one looks closely at the carbon cycle. The only time Earth experienced a notable reduction in atmospheric CO2 by growing trees was during the Carboniferous Period between 350 and 300 million years ago, when our coal resources were formed. Conversely, the slashing of our forests over the past 200 years and today in the Amazon basin has had no measurable impact on atmospheric CO2. The large-scale capture and storage of CO2 is only possible (though it remains improbable) for large thermal plants, which of course won’t be a feature of our net-zero electrical grid. Capturing emissions from tailpipes or our gas-warmed homes is now impossible and seems likely to remain so. This leaves nuclear as the only viable option for any plausible net-zero plan. Canada has 19 operating nuclear reactors at four stations, producing 15 per cent of our electricity. Net-zero would require an expansion of this fleet to over 300, operated in about 40 new nuclear power generating stations, and costing upwards of a trillion dollars. What would we get for these efforts? Net-zero would have no measurable impact on climate, as Canada emits only about 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The developing world, which emits most, is manifestly more interested in growth, not carbon reductions. Moreover, recent science shows that CO2 is not a significant driver of climate. Even the UN science reports state that the warming experienced up to 1980 was natural, that only part of warming through the 1990s was anthropogenic, and that over the past two decades warming has paused. It also shows no link to extreme weather. The only sensible option for Canada is to invest our environmental goodwill and dollars where they can have a positive effect, such as for sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and healthy waterways — and into adapting to climate change, for the climate will indeed change. It always has."
Terence Corcoran: Canada’s first 'net-zero' carbon fiasco - "The risk of green energy poverty is not new. A Portland State University study found that “efforts to shift away from fossil fuels and replace oil and coal with renewable energy sources can help reduce carbon emissions but do so at the expense of increased inequality” and create “energy poverty” by raising energy costs and forcing lower-income households to pay more for energy. Muskrat isn’t the only demonstration project for the risks inherent in trying to reorganize economic activity to meet speculative long-range net-zero objectives. The same fate awaits British Columbia’s giant Site C green power disaster, which continues to unravel financially. Costs have soared to $16-billion and continue to rise. The project, promoted as green and clean, is now the most expensive hydro dam in Canadian history."
Move to net zero 'inevitably means more mining' - "The public will need to accept greater mining activity if the world is to meet the challenge of going green. Resource experts say the current supply of various metals and minerals cannot support a global economy producing net zero carbon emissions... New mining initiatives are often met with resistance because of the negative impacts they can have on the wider environment and on health. And some activities have drawn particular ire because they've become associated with labour abuses... to switch Britain's 31.5 million petrol and diesel vehicles over to a battery-electric fleet would take an estimated 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, and 2,362,500 tonnes of copper. This amounts to twice the current annual world production of cobalt (used in battery electrodes), an entire year's world production of neodymium (to make electric motor magnets) and three-quarters of the world production of lithium (battery electrolyte). Replacing the estimated 1.4 billion internal combustion engine vehicles worldwide would need 40 times these quantities, and that's before the metal and mineral requirements of all the wind turbines and solar farms are considered... So, how should the increased mining be done? And where should it be done? These are not easy questions. Consider the rumpus presently about extending mining to the seafloor. Some car companies say they will not accept any product from the ocean because of the damage this might do to the marine environment... Andrew Bloodworth, from the British Geological Survey, said he agreed with Prof Herrington's analysis. "Perhaps the big issue is just the lead times," he remarked. "It takes a decade or more from finding material to actually mining the stuff. "The other thing that's really crucial is that it isn't just about mines; it's the whole supply chain. So, even once you've mined your lithium, you've still got to go through all the refining, all the chemical treatments, to get to the point where you are making batteries""
Environmentalists hate mines too. So I guess it's back to the stone age
We need a referendum on net zero to save Britain from the green blob - "Does the blob never learn? Voters don’t like being treated like naughty children, let alone apathetic imbeciles, by technocrats convinced that they know best. Much of the electorate is now in a permanently defiant, irritable mood. It has grown allergic to stitch-ups by the ruling class across Westminster, the City, the arts and academia, and is repelled by attempts to impose a single political vision as a fait accompli, with no debate and no consultation. This applies as much to radical environmentalism and net zero, the groupthink du jour, as it does to Brexit, the NHS, overseas wars, crime or immigration... Voters hate it when, as with the EU, they were told by Labour, Tories and Lib Dems alike that ever-closer union was the best of all possible worlds, that the only acceptable debate was about the speed of integration, and that only a racist would disagree. Ordinary folks’ revenge, when it came, was devastating. It beggars belief, therefore, that a government of Brexiteers, in power only because they led a populist rebellion against another cross-party consensus, have forgotten this crucial lesson when it comes to net zero, and are seeking to enshrine a revolution without consulting the public. Yes, the vast majority, at least in wealthy nations, wants to improve the environment, reduce pollution, bolster biodiversity, treat animals better and prevent man-made catastrophes. But that is where the near-universal consensus ends: the details of how to proceed are explosively contentious, and require democratic assent to be legitimate. The parallel with Brexit is clear: the fact that voters all agreed that another European war must be avoided didn’t mean they all wanted to fuse their countries into a superstate... Net zero involves long-term, hugely significant measures that could drastically modify lifestyles and give the state immense, permanent powers to socially engineer as it sees fit. Do you agree that all new petrol and diesel cars should be banned in just nine years’ time? Or that gas boilers should be replaced, at great cost, with heat pumps, a technology that doesn’t quite work yet? Are you willing to eat less meat and pay higher taxes? Do you disagree entirely, or accept some of these ideas but not others? Or would you prefer to take it more slowly given China’s reluctance to act? The shocking reality is that how you answer is irrelevant. The public isn’t being given a choice. The fact of, and speed, scale and method of decarbonisation have been decided: Tories, Labour and Lib Dems all agree on all the essentials. It doesn’t matter who wins the next election: a new orthodoxy rules supreme. There is no functioning democracy, no mechanism by which outcomes might change. This is a disgrace and extremely dangerous. One doesn’t have to disagree with everything the Government is planning to be concerned. I really like electric cars, though I can’t see how banning combustion engines so quickly in the absence of better, long-range batteries can work. Why not let capitalism continue to organically shift consumers over? It is great that Boris rejects the hair-shirt, neo-communist approach to greening Britain, and that he backs nuclear and hydrogen. But do I really trust a government that has waged war on the car, invented so-called low-traffic neighbourhoods and campaigned against Heathrow expansion not to revert to banning everything vaguely carbon-positive if it falls behind on its targets? Why is its nudge unit advocating a tax on meat and producers and retailers of “high-carbon” food? The inflammatory document, disowned by the Government but commissioned by the Department for Business, demonises business travel and seeks to reduce international tourism and restrict airport expansion – goodbye, capitalist freedom. Can the Government guarantee that it would never impose extreme restrictions, rationing on homes and business or even mini eco-lockdowns? Or use a punitive form of road pricing to drastically reduce mobility (as opposed to ensuring motorists pay appropriately for road usage)? Will the courts start striking down high-carbon housebuilding or farming? Net zero isn’t a technical issue: it is an inherently political question, one of the greatest choices we have ever been asked to make"
Bjorn Lomborg: Enough with the net-zero doublethink - "Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling. In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.” That is a high bar, surpassing the Second World War, the black plague and COVID. On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace. As U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told world leaders gathered at President Biden’s climate summit in April: “No one is being asked for a sacrifice.” Both claims can’t be true. Yet, they are often espoused by the same climate campaigners in different parts of their publicity cycle. The tough talk aims to shake us into action, and the promise of rainbows hides the political peril when the bills come due... The IEA’s new net-zero report contains plenty of concrete examples of sacrifices. By 2050, we will have to live with much lower energy consumption than today. Despite being richer, the average global person will be allowed less energy than today’s average poor. We will all be allowed less energy than the average Albanian used in the 1980s. We will also have to accept shivering in winter at 19°C and sweltering in summer at 26°C, lower highway speeds and fewer people being allowed to fly. But climate policy sacrifices could still make sense if their costs were lower than the achieved climate benefits. If we could avoid the 2.6 per cent climate damage for, say, one per cent sacrifice, that would be a good outcome. This is common sense and the core logic of the world’s only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize (2018 laureate William Nordhaus of Yale). Smart climate policy costs little and reduces climate damages a lot. Unfortunately, our current doublethink delivers the reverse outcome. One new peer-reviewed study finds the cost of net-zero just after 2060 — much later than most politicians promise — will cost us more than four per cent of GDP by 2040, or about $5 trillion annually. And this assumes globally coordinated carbon taxes. Otherwise, costs will more than double. Paying eight per cent or more to avoid part of 2.6 per cent damages half a century later is just bad economics. It is also implausible politics. Just for China, the cost of going net-zero exceeds seven to 14 per cent of its GDP. Instead, China uses green rhetoric to placate westerners but aims for development with 247 new coal-fired power plants. China now emits more greenhouse gases than the entire rich world. Most other poorer countries are hoping to follow China’s rapid ascendance. At a recent climate conference, where dozens of high-level delegates dutifully lauded net-zero, India went off-script. As other participants squirmed, power minister Raj Kumar Singh inconveniently blurted out the truth: net-zero “is just pie-in-the-sky.” He added that developing countries will want to use more and more fossil fuels and “you can’t stop them.” If we push on with our climate doublethink, rich people will likely continue to wring their hands and aim for net-zero, even at considerable costs to their own societies. But three-quarters of future emissions come from poorer countries pursuing what they regard as the more important development priorities of avoiding poverty, hunger and disease. Like most great challenges humanity has faced, we solve them not by pushing for endless sacrifices but through innovation. COVID is fixed with vaccines, not unending lockdowns"
Once again, white guilt screws things up
The problem with net zero - "as a target for emissions neutrality decades from now, net zero slows the momentum and pressure for climate action in the present. Carbon offsetting lies at the heart of the net zero accounting trick. The “net” of net zero makes it hard to tell whether governments and corporations are really doing the hard work to slash emissions—or if they simply plan to carry on polluting, and then offset the difference later to claim carbon neutrality. In this way it gives them impunity to continue pumping thousands of tonnes of emissions into the atmosphere, so long as they promise that at some point in the future they will compensate by offsetting that year’s pollution. This is business-as-usual in disguise."
Many climate activists don't actually care about the climate. They just want people to stop sinning now, wear hair shirts and self-flagellate
