Why Environmentalists Pose a Bigger Obstacle to Effective Climate Policy than Denialists - "It would be silly to take apart a work of satire, but as these glowing reviews attest, Don’t Look Up offers an—admittedly grotesque—version of a narrative about climate change that has been promulgated seriously by many people. In this story, solving climate change is mostly a matter of facing reality, breaking the power of fossil-fuel interests, and mustering the political courage to do what needs to be done. We already have the technological solutions to climate change, writes Naomi Klein in her influential book This Changes Everything, but they are sabotaged by a ruthless “elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” By taking that very narrative to such ludicrous extremes, Don’t Look Up has also helped me realize what exactly is wrong with it: it is a self-serving myth told by well-off Western progressives that scapegoats easy villains, distracts from genuine solutions, and stands in the way of some long-overdue soul-searching... outright denialism of the sort skewered in Don’t Look Up has been on the wane for some time. In the United States, nine out of 10 people now agree that the consequences of climate change will be felt by current and future generations. In a survey of 10 Western countries released just before the COP26 conference in Glasgow last year, 62 percent of participants agreed that climate change is the main environmental crisis the world is facing, ahead of concerns about pollution and new diseases. Even fossil fuel companies have now finally and grudgingly come to accept that their products are heating the planet. If you buy into the Don’t Look Up narrative, however, it is easy to gloss over one inconvenient fact: fossil fuels have been fantastic engines of progress for humanity, by providing access to cheap, abundant, reliable, and (relatively) safe energy. They have freed us from back-breaking labor, tripled our life expectancy, and allowed one country after another to escape from miserable poverty. Fossil fuel companies have become so powerful precisely because, at their core, they offer an extremely desirable product from which all of us benefit, both in direct and visible forms (gasoline, diesel, natural gas) and in myriad indirect forms (cement, plastics, steel, glass). Indeed, if you look around your living room, you would be hard-pressed to find any object that did not somehow involve the use of fossil fuels (if only because it will almost certainly have been hauled to you by a diesel-powered machine). Despite what many climate activists profess, we don’t yet have clean and affordable solutions for cement and steel production, fertilizer production for agriculture, or aviation. In the absence of such clean alternatives, forgoing the use of fossil fuels will inevitably entail painful sacrifices and difficult questions about how to share the burden of emission reductions. To see why “denialism” and “manipulation by elites” fail as explanations of climate inaction, consider Germany, one of the richest and most environmentally conscious nations on the planet. German political leaders have been taking the climate crisis very seriously for more than three decades, and unlike in the US, climate denialists are marginal and have never wielded political power. Even in Germany, however, getting rid of fossil fuels has proven extremely difficult. Despite having spent 500 billion euros in its much-heralded Energiewende (energy transition), Germany is still burning massive amounts of lignite and coal, and is not even remotely on track to reach its climate targets. Even with the best of intentions and tons of political goodwill—and without denialists muddying the waters—climate progress has proven elusive. Indeed, you may be surprised to learn that the US, despite experiencing much more trouble from self-professed “climate skeptics,” has achieved similar emission reductions to Germany over the past two decades, mainly by switching from coal to gas and with some energy efficiency. The disappointing outcome of Germany’s Energiewende, despite its laudable intentions, does not mean that we should abandon all hope. In fact, Germany could have performed much better than it did, and this is where the story becomes uncomfortable for the climate activists celebrating Don’t Look Up. Slashing emissions of greenhouse gases requires a range of different actions, but foremost among them are two things: first decarbonize electricity generation, then electrify everything. As it happens, there are a few industrialized countries that have already achieved an almost complete decarbonization of their electricity sector. If you exclude those with unique geographical advantages like Norway or Iceland (which benefit greatly from hydropower and geothermal, respectively), you will find that all of them did so by relying heavily on nuclear energy. Consider Germany’s neighbor France, which pulled off this feat without even worrying about global warming. Back in the 1970s, when France decided to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the climate problem was not even on the agenda. And yet, within about 15 years France had almost fully decarbonized its electricity sector and had electrified a lot of other stuff (such as electrical heating and high-speed trains). Countries like France and Sweden have demonstrated in real life that it is possible to eliminate fossil fuels without sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. The reason why the carbon intensity of German electricity, even after two full decades of Energiewende, is still more than five times higher than that of nuclear France is not because of mass delusion and elite manipulation about the reality of man-made global warming. Quite the contrary. It is because anti-nuclear environmentalists—the very same people who express the highest level of anxiety about climate change—have more political clout in Germany than in France and have convinced their political leaders that it’s an excellent “climate policy” to abandon atomic energy and close down all of their remaining reactors. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the opposition to nuclear energy became the linchpin of the environmentalist movement, anxieties about nuclear energy were perhaps more understandable, not only because climate change had not appeared on the horizon yet, but also because less was known about the environmental impact of nuclear waste and accidents (now known to be rather small) and about the environmental and health impact of coal plants (now known to be absolutely huge). In its entire history, nuclear energy has avoided around 74 billion tons of CO2 emissions, about twice the current global annual emissions. That could have been an order of magnitude higher, if the nuclear industry had continued its early rapid growth phase from the 1960s. Alas, in country after country, planned projects for nuclear power plants were canceled because of public opposition (more than 120 in the US alone), mostly led by the environmentalist movement. Excessive regulation, fueled by fear-mongering about the harms of low-level radiation, eventually led to a negative learning curve: every new reactor project was more expensive and time-consuming than the last one. And thus, the reign of King Coal was unthreatened. Even today, with climate scientists sounding the alarm ever more desperately, most environmentalists have been unwilling to give up their old fight against nuclear energy. Throughout the Western world, the battle for the premature closure of nuclear plants is being led by Green parties and NGOs. Even young climate activists like Greta Thunberg have chided the European Commission for (finally) planning to include nuclear energy in its Green taxonomy. Even today, Germany could still avoid one billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2045 if only it decided to keep its remaining reactors in operation. But the very climate-conscious German political leaders would prefer to burn more coal and lignite, the dirtiest and most CO2-intensive of all fossil fuels, for years to come. In my own country, Belgium, the Green party wants to build and subsidize brand new fossil gas plants to replace perfectly fine nuclear power plants... Time and again, we see that closing a nuclear plant means locking in fossil fuels, because you also need energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. The only technology that can replace a coal or gas plant one-for-one is a nuclear power plant, and that’s the very last thing climate activists want. #ExxonKnew indeed, and they didn’t care. Here is the really “inconvenient truth” for the climate movement: the main obstacle to effective climate action for the past two decades has not been the climate denialists who refuse to face the reality of the problem, but the environmentalists who incessantly demonized and sabotaged our most important source of concentrated, weather-independent, dispatchable, zero-carbon energy (which also happens to be the safest and least polluting one). The opposition to nuclear energy is not the only way in which mainstream environmentalists have, with the best of intentions, hurt the cause of climate action. Though anti-nuclearism is the most consequential mistake, a similar story can be told about GMO technology (which has a range of climate benefits), Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and market-based climate solutions like carbon pricing. By dismissing such solutions as “technofixes” and promoting “less is more” and “small is beautiful” solutions instead, environmentalists have ironically underestimated the true magnitude of our climate challenge. More generally, the co-opting of climate science to launch attacks on capitalism, consumerist culture, neoliberalism, and a host of other left-wing bugbears having little or nothing to do with climate change, has fueled the ideological polarization around the issue. Though the science of climate change transcends all ideology, the same cannot be said of mainstream climate activism... Luckily, there are hopeful signs that the tide is turning. Now that traditional Greens and progressives are losing their monopoly on the climate issue, and other parties with different ideologies have become involved, political interest in nuclear energy and other technological solutions is rapidly increasing. The Netherlands, France, the UK and a host of other Western countries have announced that they will be building new nuclear plants, because it has dawned on them that renewables alone will not save us from climate disaster. China plans to build 150 new nuclear reactors, which promises to collectively avert more CO2 emissions than half of the current total annual emissions of the European Union. Europe itself plans to include nuclear energy in its Green taxonomy, despite loud protest by Green NGOs and anti-nuclear countries like Germany and Austria. In Finland, even the Green party has come around to nuclear energy."
Behind the Rise of U.S. Solar Power, a Mountain of Chinese Coal - WSJ - "Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels. But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China. Concerns are mounting in the U.S. and Europe that the solar industry’s reliance on Chinese coal will create a big increase in emissions in the coming years as manufacturers rapidly scale up production of solar panels to meet demand. That would make the solar industry one of the world’s most prolific polluters, analysts say, undermining some of the emissions reductions achieved from widespread adoption. For years, China’s low-cost, coal-fired electricity has given the country’s solar-panel manufacturers a competitive advantage, allowing them to dominate global markets... Producing a solar panel in China creates around twice as much carbon dioxide as making it in Europe, said Fengqi You, professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell University. In some countries or regions that don’t rely heavily on fossil fuels for electricity generation, such as Norway and France, installing a high-carbon, Chinese-made solar panel might not reduce emissions at all, Mr. You said."
Having Fun Watching Wind And Solar Failing To Step Up To Power The World Economy - "You don’t have to be any kind of a genius to figure out that wind and solar generation are never going to supplant fossil fuels in powering the world economy. The main reason is that the wind and sun only work part time, indeed well less than half of the time at best. With wind, you never know when it might work, and over a year a given facility might on average produce about 30-35% of rated capacity, with long and random periods of nothing. With the sun, you know from the get-go that you will get nothing fully half the time (i.e., night); and cloudy days wipe out half and more of the remaining half, again at random times. Averaged over the year, you’ll be lucky to get 20% of rated capacity from a solar facility... Thankfully the U.S., home of fracking, has mostly been spared the huge natural gas price spikes that have befallen Europe and Asia. If the dopes occupying the White House and leading the Congress had their way, we would be suffering the fate of those places and worse. And oil? It’s suddenly trading at $80 and more per barrel, the highest prices since 2014. Expect that fact to show up in gas prices at the pump over the course of the next few weeks or days. But what are we missing? Shouldn’t wind and solar just step up to fill in the gaps? After all, they are clean, and they are green, we have lots of brand new facilities, and the fuel is abundant and free. The question is of course facetious. Wind and solar are completely useless to step in when supplies of fossil fuels are tight. You can cover the landscape with them, but on a calm night you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing. Essentially you need the same fossil fuel capacity as if you had never built any wind or solar facilities at all. While we’re at this, we might as well look over to the big energy story on the front page of today’s New York Times. That would be “World Wants Action as China Gushes Emissions.” It’s a big three-column extravaganza, continued to all of page A-12 in the interior. The bottom line: China is producing a huge percentage of the world’s manufactured goods, and it currently has a shortage of electricity to do the job, and it’s going to build more fossil fuel power plants whether the pooh-bahs of the rest of the world like it or not... But hasn’t China built all kinds of wind and solar facilities, and for that matter hydropower? The Times calls them the “world leader” in all three categories... So why don’t they just use these sources to provide the power they need and forget about the coal and the natural gas? The Times will never say it, but the fact is that all the wind and solar are completely for show. They produce some small amounts of power at random times, and then when you really need them they can’t be counted on. So China continues to build natural gas and coal plants, while mouthing empty promises about maybe someday slowing that process down... Anyway, we’re little by little seeing the inevitable consequences of trying to replace real energy that works (fossil fuels) with fairy dust. This will continue until the low and middle income people of the world figure this out and throw the climate cultists out of power. Meanwhile, those of us who pay attention can have some fun watching the inevitable crash of the wind and solar fantasy."
Solar Power's Benefits Don't Shine Equally on Everyone - Scientific American - "Racial and ethnic minorities have less access to solar power, regardless of income, highlighting the need for environmental justice... access to this energy has not been equitable—and not just because up-front installation costs can price out people with lower incomes. A 2019 study indicates that even when income is taken out of the equation, communities of color have installed fewer rooftop solar facilities than predominantly white communities. The data are among the first to show such inequality in access to clean energy, a situation advocates have reported anecdotally for years"
I gotta hand it to liberals. They can bring race into everything
This is evidence that environmentalism is driven by white guilt, and minorities have better things to do than virtue signal about the environment
'Solar trash tsunami': How solar power is driving a looming environmental crisis - "The meteoric rise of solar power is set to spark a “tsunami” of unrecyclable trash as consumers trade out their obsolete solar panels for better ones, according to new research out of the University of Calgary... solar panels have a short lifespan and are particularly ill-suited for recycling. They contain very few materials worth recovering, and as bulky sheets of glass, they’re expensive to transport to a recycling facility... The International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) was sounding the alarm on solar waste as early as 2016, warning that by 2050 the world would need to figure out a way to deal with up to 78 million tonnes of outdated solar infrastructure. For context, New York City — one of the most trash-producing cities on the entire planet — produces only 14 million tonnes of waste each year. Nevertheless, Duran’s team pegs the IREA number as a vast underestimate because it assumes that most of the world’s existing solar panels will remain bolted to roofs for at least 30 years. The more likely scenario, they estimate, is that millions of people can be expected to rip out their solar panels early in order to install replacements that are cheaper and more efficient. In that case, by 2030 the volume of solar waste could be up to 50 times higher than anticipated by IREA. By 2035, the solar industry could be generating 2.5 tonnes of waste for every tonne of solar panel it installs — overwhelming municipalities and homeowners with disposal costs. “The economics of solar — so bright-seeming from the vantage point of 2021 — would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash,” she and her co-authors wrote in a recent review of their research for the Harvard Business Review. And Duran’s team only studied the solar panels bolted to residential homes. Add in industrial solar farms and the replacement costs become “much, much larger.” The study compared the coming global tide of solar trash to the ongoing e-waste crisis. The sudden rise of quick-to-obsolescence computers, televisions and mobile phones has spawned literal mountains of difficult-to-recycle trash loaded with harmful chemicals, such as lead and cadmium. In the worst instances, shipping containers full of black market e-waste find their way to unregulated dumps in the developing world... solar isn’t the only aspect of the green economy with a looming and unaddressed waste problem, pointing to a coming tide of obsolete electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, both of which similarly have no easy conduit to recycling."
COP26: Virus expert brands eco loos with no hot water at climate summit as 'a load of b******s' amid Covid surge fears - "VIRUS expert Professor Hugh Pennington last night branded COP26’s energy- saving eco loos with no hot water for handwashing “a load of b******s”.The top microbiologist blasted conference bosses over their decision to save energy and reduce CO2 emissions by providing only cold taps. And he warned the move could discourage the gathering’s 30,000 global dignitaries from scrubbing long enough to kill germs. It comes amid fears that the numbers congregating at Glasgow’s SEC for the event — plus tens of thousands protesting in the streets — could lead to a surge in bug rates. Speaking at the end of the summit’s first week, the Aberdeen Uni academic said: “Saving the planet by having cold water? What a load of b******s. We have hot water for good reasons. It's a rather silly argument to have cold water because of climate change. “It seems like a demonstration that something is being done, rather than it making much difference."
Covid aside, climate change hysteria is about making your life miserable with negligible impact on the planet
Why you can't just blame climate change for B.C. being on fire - "Although the fires have become an emblem around the world of the destructive effects of climate change, many of the province’s forestry experts are pointing out that while climate change makes fires more likely, it’s poor forestry management that is helping to make them more destructive. “Even if we were able to turn back the dial on climate change we would still have wildfires that are severe and would burn people’s houses down,” said Jesse Zeman, director of fish and wildlife restoration with the B.C. Wildlife Federation... B.C. forests [are] piled high with what wildfire experts call “fuel load” — the accumulated debris, deadwood and untreated clearcut areas that can dramatically accelerate the speed and intensity of a wildfire. “We’re learning that by protecting our forests we’re really just building a bigger bomb,” said Zeman. In the aftermath of the disastrous 2017 fire season, the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences sent an open letter to B.C. Premier John Horgan highlighting the need for more prescribed burns to curb fuel load in the province’s forests... Long before the arrival of Europeans to what is now British Columbia, many Indigenous groups practiced prescribed burns. It encouraged the growth of edible plants such as camas while also yielding forests that were easier to navigate... the case for prescribed burns was bolstered when wildfires surged into Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon, where ecologists have spent years using low-level fires to bolster stands of ponderosa. As Pete Caligiuri, one of the researchers at the preserve, told NPR “generally speaking, what firefighters were reporting on the ground is that when the fire came into those areas that had been thinned … it had significantly less impact.”"
Maybe calling environmentalists against forest management racist will work
Electric Coach Beached in Cornwall - "The fully electric coach affectionately nicknamed the ‘Carbon Battle Bus’, which started its UK wide Zero Carbon Tour this week in London before heading to Cornwall this weekend, has been left with 46% charge and a range of 60 to 70 miles but no charging points close enough to complete the South West tour from Cornwall. As the G7 leaders meet today to discuss accelerating climate action, it demonstrates how fast we must increase investment and policies to meet our zero carbon commitments."
I love how they just double down
Electric Car Owners Switching to Gas Because Charging Hassle: Study - "In roughly three minutes, you can fill the gas tank of a Ford Mustang and have enough range to go about 300 miles with its V8 engine. But on a recent 200-mile trip from Boston to New York in the Mustang's electric Mach-E variant, Axios' Dan Primack said he felt "panic" as his battery level dipped below 23% while searching for a compatible charger to complete his trip. "I was assured that this might be one of the country's easiest EV routes," Primack wrote. "Those assurances were misplaced." For Bloomberg automotive analyst Kevin Tynan, an hour plugged into his household outlet gave the Mach-E just three miles of range. "Overnight, we're looking at 36 miles of range"... Roughly one in five plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners switched back to owning gas-powered cars, in large part because charging the batteries was a pain in the… trunk... Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Bolt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty — something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV. EVs have come a long way in recent years in terms of range, safety, comfort, and tech features, but Hardman and Tal note that very little has changed in terms of how they are recharged."
California, Facing Power Crisis, Frets Over Electric Car Charging Routines - "As temperatures hit triple digits during California's heat wave last week, the state's power grid operators encouraged residents to relieve pressure on the grid by charging their electric vehicles before the peak energy use times of day... Matthew Moniot, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said during a recent interview with Newsweek that electric vehicle owners now mostly charge their vehicles at night, but that will likely have to change so that more drivers are charging while energy production levels are higher. "If you look at aggregate load across the grid, it tends to spike in the evening hours whenever people come home," Moniot said. Though energy use tends to dip overnight while people are sleeping, that is also the time when less energy is produced by solar and wind, both of which are energy sources Moniot said will be increasingly relied upon as states like California continue embracing clean energy."
Good luck to grid stability when there're even more electric vehicles, and supply becomes even more unreliable due to renewables. Maybe to demonstrate their commitment to the environment, people need to take time off work to charge their electric cars in the day
Are electric cars the new 'diesel scandal'? Expert looks at the future for road travel - "Do you remember Britain’s ‘dash for diesel’? It began more than 20 years ago when the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced a new car tax system favouring vehicles with lower emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Diesel cars tend to be more fuel-efficient with lower emissions, and Mr Brown hailed them as the greener and cheaper option. Over a decade and a half, the number of such vehicles on British roads quadrupled. What didn’t emerge until much later — although it was no secret in the motor industry or among government officials — was that diesel cars also emitted greater quantities of other pollutants, nitrogen oxides and particulates that damage air quality and human health. Such particulates, which have been linked to respiratory problems, heart disease and lung cancer, have been responsible for thousands of premature deaths... Today, diesel is a dirty word and many countries penalise drivers with extra congestion charges and vehicle duty. I was reminded of this by the recent warning from the Environment Secretary, George Eustice, on the ‘polluting particles’ produced by battery-powered vehicles. Not from exhaust emissions, but from brake linings, tyres and road surfaces, because such vehicles are much heavier owing to the presence of the battery... electric cars are not the answer for many people, for a host of practical reasons. These include their upfront cost, limited range, the time it takes to charge batteries, the new infrastructure needed for charging points and the extra power required to supply them. Even more alarmingly, a report in the journal Nature suggests that because electric cars are heavier than other vehicles, they will likely kill more occupants of other vehicles in traffic accidents. As for climate change, electric cars will do little to arrest it. So for now, at least, they are one of the least effective and most expensive ways to cut carbon — and economically they are a bad bet. Just last week, a report by the Commons Transport Committee found that taxpayers face an eye-watering £35 billion bill to plug the gap created by the switch to electric cars. At present, owners of such cars pay neither fuel duty, which nets £28 billion every year, nor vehicle exercise duty, which brings in £7 billion. The revenue is spent on schools, hospitals and other priorities such as the police, as well as fixing roads. And not only do they reduce government revenue, they also demand costly subsidies. In Germany, the subsidy is above ¤10,000 (£8,460) for a fully electric car, but that still drives only one sale in eight. Norway leads the global race, with electric cars accounting for 65 per cent of new sales, but it takes a ludicrous amount of government cash to achieve this. It includes savings of $29,000 (£21,400) on average per car in sales and registration tax, and $11,000 (£8,100) on road tolls. Who is buying the cars is another concern. A study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that almost all electric car subsidies go to the wealthiest 20 per cent, for whom the purchase of an extra car is no great sacrifice. In addition, 90 per cent of electric car owners also have a fossil-fuel vehicle they use for longer journeys. As for charging, for many owners this is simply a question of fitting a point in their driveway. But 40 per cent of UK households don’t have access to off-street parking. According to some estimates, the global cost of building the infrastructure needed is $6 trillion (£4.4 trillion). And what of the huge increase in power production needed to charge millions of electric cars? Climate policy is already adding more than £10 billion annually to Britain’s electricity costs, as inefficient renewables continue to need support. If the extra power required for charging the cars is generated from fossil fuels to keep electricity costs down, much of the environmental gain would be lost. In time, better technology will make batteries cheaper and electric cars will become more economical. But concerns over range and recharging will be much more difficult to rectify. The truth is that most people invest in cars because they give them mobility. They don’t want to be stuck with a flat battery or endure forced stops to top it up. All of the above is why many people are reluctant to embrace electric vehicles, even with huge bribes. According to one authoritative study, even by 2050 electric cars will make up just 20 per cent of global car travel... The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that if every nation achieves their ambitious targets on increasing electric car ownership, it will reduce CO2 emissions in this decade by 235 million tons. That, according to the UN Climate Panel’s standard model, will reduce global temperatures by about one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius (0.0001c) by the end of the century. Such modest climate benefits don’t make up for the additional downsides of electric vehicles, which include the harsh environmental and social costs that come with mining rare metals needed for batteries. So what should politicians be doing? For a start, they could stop showering subsidies on electric cars and focus on smarter solutions. The IEA found that hybrid cars save about the same amount of CO2 as electric cars over their lifetime. Moreover, they are already competitive with petrol cars price-wise — even without subsidies — and, crucially, they don’t have most of the electric car downsides outlined above. It is also possible there will be a place for hydrogen-powered vehicles in a greener future, too. Finally, we need to realise that climate change doesn’t care about where the emissions come from. Personal cars account for just 7 per cent of global emissions."
No, we should not bring back rationing - "With COP26 just a few days away, environmentalists are ratcheting up their demands for eco-austerity. Actress Joanna Lumley has even suggested that rationing should be reintroduced to help the environment... She proposed that people be ‘given a certain number of points and it’s up to you how to spend them, whether it’s buying a bottle of whisky or flying in an airplane’... ‘make do with less’ might as well be the motto of the entire environmentalist movement. Take, for example, the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on climate policy. It attacked ministers this week for failing to include reductions in road travel, flying and meat-eating in the government’s recent Net Zero announcements. The committee has previously stated that the bulk of carbon-emissions reductions will have to come from ‘behaviour change and individual choices’ rather than from new green tech. This will require an ‘attitudinal shift’ among the public, it said. In other words, we must lower our expectations and accept a worse quality of life in order to lessen our impact on the natural world. Despite the CCC’s complaints, the government is already doing plenty to make things harder for ordinary people in the name of combating climate change. It plans to replace diesel and petrol cars with electric cars, and to replace gas boilers with unreliable heat pumps, even though the average household will struggle to afford the costs. Add to that soaring energy bills, which have been exacerbated by the UK’s overreliance on unreliable renewable-energy sources like wind and solar, and it is clear that for the government it is climate first and the public second. Almost every policy proposed by environmentalists is based on the idea that humans need to reduce their impact on the world. Even the idea of the ‘carbon footprint’ reflects this – measuring every human activity not by the good it does for us, but by the impact it has on the planet. Environmentalist ideology is all about limiting, reducing and shrinking the human footprint. Environmentalists want to limit our perfectly natural desire to produce and consume. They call for self-flagellation and self-sacrifice in the face of climate change, instead of the innovation and growth that has helped humanity solve all manner of challenges throughout history."
Environmental hysteria - making ordinary people's lives worse
The climate change cult now owes more to religion than rationality - "Everybody seems to accept, after recent events, that scientific advice can lead to disastrous government policy. It is now widely believed that misjudgements on the part of official scientific advisers led to the wrong decisions being made in the early stages of the pandemic. Dutifully following what ministers insisted on calling The Science was, it turns out, not such a great idea after all. Before this incident slips away into the annals of historic political scandals, we should ask what precisely went wrong – because the governments of the world are currently facing another set of far-reaching decisions prompted by scientific advice, which involve even greater potential for catastrophe. That particular scientists, at a particular moment, made a mistaken strategic calculation in an unprecedented health crisis is not shocking, or even terribly surprising. It does not dishonour those individuals whose advice they sincerely believed to be well-founded. Nor does it discredit the authority of science itself. What happened – and could possibly be about to happen again – arose from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is, and the degree to which its findings can be regarded as inviolable. The clue is in the way that government ministers described the scientific opinion to which they were adhering so assiduously. Matt Hancock in one memorable moment actually said that “with science on our side” we would inevitably defeat Covid. What was notable about this fatuous statement was not just the idea that “science” (as opposed to individual scientists) can ever be on anybody’s side, but its startling resemblance to a testament of religious belief. Just replace the word “science” in that phrase with the word “God”... the essential mistake was made by ministers who treated science as if it were revealed truth rather than what it actually is: a mode of inquiry that relies on endless questioning, competing theories, exhaustive argument, the examination of contradictory evidence, and, above all, the toleration of disagreement, in order to progress. (To the extent that the scientific advisers were complicit in the Government’s naive view of their disciplines, they must be seen as culpable.)... Let me say from the start that I am not qualified to make scientific judgements about the empirical facts of this matter. (Nor, of course, are some of the prominent exponents of the most extreme version of the climate campaign: Greta Thunberg does not have a degree in any scientific subject and famously withdrew from formal education to pursue her public mission.)... there is something about this movement that is so suspiciously imitative of an extreme religious cult that it is very hard to see how it could be compatible with the spirit of scientific endeavour. Climate campaigning, at least in its most well-publicised form, embodies everything that one would expect to see in a movement of fanatical fundamentalist fervour: the concept of original sin (industrialisation) that requires an acceptance of universal guilt which can only be expiated through self-denial and penance (sacrificing personal prosperity and freedoms). The political establishments of the grown-up developed world are now promulgating accusations and vengeful warnings delivered by child saints of the terrible world-destroying punishments to come if their cries of woe are not heeded. All of this is somehow incongruous: a bizarre melding of modern media and the Middle Ages. There is something absurdly childlike and unscientific about the anthropomorphising of the planet which is inevitably referred to as if it were a sentient being, a loving parent (Mother Earth?) which is in danger of being destroyed by our ungrateful, selfish behaviour – even though the spread of industrial progress and mass prosperity around the world could be seen as the opposite of selfishness. Alongside this beatification of the planet as a living presence which must be protected from our rapaciousness, goes an absurdly sentimental picture of Nature... it is this presumption that humanity must be the source of all evil that makes the climate campaign seem so bizarrely unscientific. It is a moral crusade with echoes of an age of unreason – when modern science, from Galileo onwards, has seen itself as the essence of rational thinking and the opponent of dogmatism. Perhaps the decline of proper religious belief, which offered at least a possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation with past error, left a vacuum that could only be filled by self-loathing."
Alan McIntire's answer to Has anyone plugged climate data from 1960 into the Global Circulation Models used to predict climate change, run the models for 50 year simulation and compared the results with what actually happened? - Quora - "John Christy did. ( It was 40 years rather than 50 years. We’ll have to wait until 2025 to get 50 years, since the models started in 1975) He stated that 95% of climate models overpredict warming by about 50%... since 1995 the disparity is increasing significantly. The models greatly overestimate the warming of the bulk atmosphere"
Global land change from 1982 to 2016 - "contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics. Global bare ground cover has decreased by 1.16 million km2 (−3.1%), most notably in agricultural regions in Asia. Of all land changes, 60% are associated with direct human activities and 40% with indirect drivers such as climate change. Land-use change exhibits regional dominance, including tropical deforestation and agricultural expansion, temperate reforestation or afforestation, cropland intensification and urbanization"
