GOLDSTEIN: UN's cure for climate change -- 10 more years of recessions | Toronto Sun - "In order to address human-induced climate change, according to the United Nations, the global economy will have to undergo a decade of annual economic recessions worse than the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic last year... during a recession people have less money to spend, so they buy fewer goods and services, almost all of which are provided, created, manufactured, grown and/or transported using fossil fuel energy. (This is also the reason why carbon taxes, directly and indirectly, raise the cost of almost everything.) When Trudeau and, for that matter, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, say they are going to “make the polluters pay” for emitting industrial greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, what they mean is they are going to make us pay, because we are the “polluters.”"
Green energy isn't viable without subsidies: Audit | Toronto Sun - "An internal report at the Department of Natural Resources that looked at the program from 2002-19 says without subsidies, few green energy projects like solar panels, wind farms, and geothermal projects can survive financially"
Bitcoin, Weed, and NFTs - "This is par for the course for the ecological holier-than-thou crowd. They pick a product or behavior they don’t like and emphasize every possible downside while ignoring benefits, tradeoffs, and the implications of their own logic. Whether it’s opposition to digital artwork or a rejection of the pretty widespread consumer preference for indoor-grown cannabis, these attitudes traffic in the same scarcity mindset that leads climate advocates to oppose eating almonds or flying across the country to visit your grandparents. This ascetic aesthetic is no way to garner concern for climate change, and is certainly no way to build a low-carbon, climate-resilient future. That’s why we at Breakthrough favor treating environmental problems as technological challenges, not primarily as the outcomes of personal or even institutional vice. If we adequately address climate change, we will do so by building a future of abundance, not scarcity."
This is precisely why environmentalists oppose nuclear after all - because it's too good, and their aim is to impoverish humanity
EU proposes making solar panels mandatory on all new buildings - "In the short term, citizens and businesses can save energy by reducing heating temperatures and reducing the use of air conditioning, switching off lights, using more public transport and using household appliances more efficiently"
Good luck with higher energy bills and reducing your quality of life because of the sacred cow of renewable energy
Facebook - "EU wants to radically change itself to reduce emissions 55% by 2030 Extra cost upwards of €10,000 per EU citizen (€5tr) It will reduce global temps by 0.004°C (0.007°F) Let's not be surprised when the rest of the world doesn't follow"
Virtue signalling isn't meant to deliver results. Meanwhile China will laugh at how the West is destroying itself
World stands to lose $245 trillion by 2070 if temperatures rise by 3 deg C: Study
They're smart this time. They know this is far out enough that people will forget / die by then
Michael Moore takes on the greens - "Planet of the Humans is a new documentary about the environmental movement, produced by Michael Moore. It was released on YouTube on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It is free to watch. But for fans of Moore, it is probably quite painful. It is not what you might normally expect from the Oscar-winning, progressive critic of modern America. What his latest film argues is that his old antagonists – Big Oil and Big Business – have rebadged themselves as ‘clean and green’. Environmentalism has become an ally of the capitalists. ‘Green renewable energy and industrial civilisation are one and the same’, says the narrator and director, Jeff Gibbs, a long-time associate of Moore. In one embarrassing segment, Gibbs visits an Earth Day festival in Washington, DC. He discovers that it was part-sponsored by Toyota, CitiBank, YouTube, Caterpillar and other big corporations. And despite the hosts proclaiming that the event is solar-powered, it is in fact powered by diesel generators. Much of the film is focused on biomass. Gibbs claims that Bill McKibben, the ‘grand poobah’ of the environmental movement in the US, has praised projects which use biomass to produce energy and has even promoted investment in them. But it turns out that in order to generate this clean, green biomass energy, forests need to be razed to the ground and tossed into huge incinerators. Similarly, Al Gore may have won a Nobel Peace Prize for his climate-change PowerPoint presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, but the film shows that he was the chairman of an investment fund, Generation Investment Management, which helped to promote logging in the Amazon rainforest... what about those solar panels? As Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions, tells Gibbs, the production process is hardly green. Though advocates of solar energy claim that photovoltaic panels are made from sand, Zehner points out that sand has too many impurities. So instead they are actually made from pure quartz, which has to be mined and then melted with coal. The film shows a ghastly quartz mine in North Carolina, which is as dirty as any coal mine in West Virginia. Wind turbines are no good either, we learn. They provide no power when there is no wind, which means they need to be supplemented by power from coal or natural gas. The film shows a windmill graveyard – after a short lifespan, the turbines wear out and need to be replaced. All in all, Planet of the Humans shows that green energy can sometimes be just as destructive as the technology it replaces. ‘Is there anything too terrible to qualify as green energy?’... Climate scientists and environmental groups are furious with the film. Moore and Gibbs failed to interview any non-white experts, one critic sputtered. A critic at Vox says that some of the more scandalous examples of green inefficiency are outdated and that Bill McKibbens and the Sierra Club are unjustly maligned. Some have called for the film to be taken down from YouTube... the film is right to say that the environmental movement is a secular religion. ‘The right has religion and they have a belief in infinite fossil fuels. Our side says, “We are OK. We are going to have solar panels, wind towers”’, says Gibbs. ‘Could it be that we can’t face our own mortality. Could we have a religion we are unaware of?’, he continues. He is right. Just look at the crowds marching behind Extinction Rebellion banners chanting mantras and drenching themselves with fake blood – it is an ersatz religion... the film is right to say that green credentials are easy to fake... Greta Thunberg may have sailed across the Atlantic in a yacht which produces zero carbon emissions, but several crew members had to fly back to Europe after the trip, creating gazillions of emissions... the main problem with the film is that in his rejection of green energy, Gibbs ends up advocating population control. At times, he is far more misanthropic than the people he attacks. ‘It’s not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet. It’s us’, he says. Planet of the Humans is essentially channelling Paul Erhlich’s discredited 1968 book, The Population Bomb"
Finally They Admit Renewables Are Terrible For The Environment - "a group of activist scientists denounced me as factually wrong, and demanded that I be censored by Facebook. They drew on junk science to claim that solar required just 3.6 times more land and wind just 5.8 times more than nuclear and natural gas plants. In response, Facebook censored me and denied me the right to appeal their verdict. But now researchers at Princeton University and Bloomberg News have admitted that I was right and my critics were wrong. They have just published research showing that wind farms require 370 times more land than nuclear plants, and that shifting away from nuclear and toward renewables, as Biden’s climate plan would do, would have a devastating impact on America’s natural environments. “A 200-megawatt wind farm,” notes Bloomberg, “might require spreading turbines over 19 square miles (49 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.” Everyone agrees that we can increase, to some extent, the amount of electricity from solar panels and wind turbines. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, whose mission is to promote renewables, claims 74% of California’s electricity could come from solar panels. Princeton estimates that 11% of electricity could come from offshore wind projects by 2050. But after generating just 23% of its electricity from solar panels, California is suffering from blackouts and price spikes stemming from over-dependence on weather-dependent energies. Imagine what tripling solar production would do. And it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. will add anything close to that amount of off-shore wind. Today, there are total of just seven off-shore wind turbines. Generating 11% of our electricity from them would require building 20,000 of them. And that’s unlikely to happen given widespread opposition from conservationists, fisherfolk, and local residents. The U.S. would need to triple the amount of transmission lines, according to Princeton researchers, under a high-renewables future. But new transmission lines are being successfully opposed by a grassroots conservationists worried about whooping cranes and other endangered species. The same thing has occurred in renewables-heavy Germany... in its current form, Biden’s plan would result in the loss of half of America’s nuclear power plants between now and 2030, which would nearly wipe out nearly all of the electricity Princeton researchers say could be generated by off-shore wind. Despite repeated appeals by Environmental Progress and the world’s leading environmental scientists, Congressional Democrats have rejected proposals to even modestly level the playing field by offering nuclear plants a fraction of the subsidies Congress has been giving solar and wind. Anti-nuclear Democrats in Congress demanding 100% renewables have the strong support from progressives in the news media. “Unlike fossil fuels — which get more expensive as we pull more of them from the ground, because extracting a dwindling resource requires more and more work — renewable energy is based on technologies that get cheaper as we make more,” claimed New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo... But fossil fuels have become cheaper over the centuries and decades, not more expensive. In fact, the biggest story in energy over the last decade has been the declining cost of natural gas from fracking, which is the main reason the U.S. reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation in history. For years researchers have calculated that the fracking revolution resulted in $100 billion being added to the U.S. economy every year in the form of lower energy prices. And every serious student of technology knows that declining cost of producing energy is one of the largest factors driving economic growth. Fewer people are required to produce energy, which allows us to do different things. Meanwhile, the era of cheap Chinese solar appears to be over. The solar industry today is in crisis, wracked by evidence that forced labor is being used to make solar panels in Xinjiang province in China, where the U.S. State Department says that Chinese government is engaged in genocide against its ethnic Uyghur Muslim minority, forcing over one million of them into concentration camps. And every place that deploys renewables energies at scale makes electricity more expensive. California has seen its electricity prices rise 7 times more than they did in the rest of the U.S. since 2011. Germany saw its electricity prices rise 50% as it deployed renewables and today they are the highest in Europe. France spends about half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions as Germany. The reason is because while solar panels and wind turbines can be produced for less, integrating them into electricity grids requires more and more land, labor, transmission lines, and storage, which all serve to drive up costs, which are largely hidden from consumers and policymakers. Weather-dependent renewables like industrial solar and wind projects externalize onto the public their high costs. If you are a generalist tech columnist for places like The New York Times you can rely on the opinions of others, without digging very deeply, or even seeking out a different perspective. In Manjoo’s case, it appears he wasn’t even aware that a big part of the reason China had made solar panels cheaper was through forced labor."
Now the Planet Will Be Saved: Climate Nut Attacks Mona Lisa - "If someone wanted to write a parody of climate activist lunacy, he or she could do worse than construct a scenario in which a crazed defender of the planet earth disguised himself as an old lady in a wheelchair, complete with wig and lipstick, and then entered the Louvre in Paris, where, in front of shocked crowds, he jumped up and tried to smash the bulletproof glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s renowned Mona Lisa, finally settling for smearing the glass with cake. But the Left is beyond parody these days, as you can see from the large number of Babylon Bee stories coming true, and the cake-wielding climate activist is real: he smeared the Mona Lisa with his dessert on Sunday... This man would likely recoil in horror at the prospect of cutting down a tree, but he willingly hatched and went ahead with this plot to destroy a 600-year-old work of art, one of the global masterpieces of human achievement. Human achievement, of course, means nothing to hardcore climate activists, who would happily see it all destroyed if to do so would ensure that “the planet” would be freed from the alleged depredations of the human race... The man who tried to destroy the Mona Lisa is a product of today’s educational system. He was clearly a good, dutiful student, and he absorbed the lessons he was supposed to learn. He learned that the number one threat in the world today is climate change, and that if we don’t act now to destroy the economies of the Western world, it will mean nothing less than the end of the world. The Mona Lisa attacker is also proof that the climate hysteria that is ubiquitous nowadays is doing nothing less than driving people crazy. Here is someone who could likely be living a worthwhile life if he hadn’t been made mad by pseudoscientific fantasies and fallacies. The clown who attacked the Mona Lisa likely calculated that it wouldn’t matter much if he destroyed it, as the whole earth is going to be destroyed in nine years anyway"
Facebook - ""If everyone lived like the US, we'd need 5 earths" Statements like these are almost completely fallacious. They are mostly designed to scare. Today is Earth Overshoot Day — where it is somewhat unreasonably claimed that we have used up 100% of the world. Rest of the year, we're running up an ecological debt. This is mostly silly. The ecological footprint analysis comes from an interesting attempt to measure how much land the world uses. It then compares it to how much biocapacity is available. Not surprisingly, this is difficult... In total, we use about 67% of the world. Not scary. This might be why they add energy use. Now, how do you add energy use as an area? The ecological footprint analysis has decided to use the *least area effective* solution — the one that gives the most scary number. They assume that we have to add forest so that we can soak up all the CO₂ emitted every year. That means we need to plant forest on 106% of all the bioavailable world. Of course, that is impossible. It also leads to the scary conclusion that we use 173% of the world's resources and that we're running out of earth today. It is also silly. Even if we wanted to soak up all CO₂, we could do so by building solar panels or nuclear power plants that would take up a tiny fraction of what forests would use (<1%). Why not use that for the calculation? But of course, that would not generate headlines that we're running out of earth today, or that living like the US would require five earths."
Facebook, other tech giants censor facts about climate change - "The online world has become a free-speech battleground. Tech platforms have sided with illiberal regimes to censor posts while flagging “misinformation” in free countries. We all share a legitimate interest in avoiding outright falsehoods, but much censorship today — whether at dictators’ behest or in the name of eradicating “misinformation” — ultimately is about restricting discourse to a narrow corridor of the politically acceptable. That makes it harder to identify smart policies. This is especially troubling for important issues like climate change. Global warming is real and man-made. However, social-media giants — Facebook in particular — are going far beyond censoring people for denying its existence... 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. The paper is the first to show that globally, every year, half a million people die because temperatures are too hot, while 4.5 million people die because it is too cold. In other words, nine times more people die from the cold than the heat. 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. As that author stated, from 2000 to 2019, “Earth’s temperature increased by 0.26 degree Centigrade per decade. This reduced cold-related deaths by 0.51% and increased heat-related mortality by 0.21%, which led to a reduction in net mortality due to hot and cold temperatures.”... 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. ellingly, 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. Consistently silencing inconvenient truths leaves us all less well-informed and risks us walking blindly into spending a fortune without sorely needed perspective."
"Misinformation" is anything that hurts the liberal agenda
Climate-Change Censorship: Phase Two - WSJ - "Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition. A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership. Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.” Ms. McCarthy cited the week-long power outage in Texas in February 2021. “The first thing we read in the paper was” that the blackouts occurred “because of those wind turbines,” she said. “That became the mantra.” In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels. We were among the few to point out that wind energy plunged as temperatures dropped and turbines froze. Gas-fired plants couldn’t make up for the wind shortfall despite running all-out, and then some went down too. Ms. McCarthy doesn’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that renewable energy sources are making the grid increasingly unreliable. Comparing fossil-fuel companies to Big Tobacco, she complained that “dark money” is being used to “fool” the public about “the benefits of clean energy.” “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast.” Got that, Mark Zuckerberg ? Merely pointing out technical limitations of lithium-ion batteries could be “disinformation.” Asked whether climate disinformation posed a threat to public health, Ms. McCarthy replied “absolutely” while adding hilariously that “President Biden doesn’t focus on, and neither do I on, bashing the fossil-fuel companies.” The Axios interviewer smiled and nodded along. Some conservative scholars argue that Big Tech companies could be sued as “state actors” for violating users’ First Amendment speech rights when they censor content at the behest of government officials. Ms. McCarthy is helping make their case."
Facebook - "What is the world’s deadliest environmental problem? Not climate. Outdoor and indoor air pollution Let’s not get so scared about climate that we forget the much bigger problems"
Facebook - "Climate exaggeration just won't end The Atlantic now tells us that "heat waves hot enough to cook human flesh are already happening this month" No Made-up (which is why there is no link)"
Facebook - "Biden's national climate advisor making absurd claims—again "Billions of human beings across the world every year dying because it is related to climate or fossil fuels" Last year: climate "most significant public health issue""
Eco-anxiety is overwhelming kids. Where’s the line between education and alarmism? - The Washington Post - " High school sophomore Sophie Kaplan is marching in a bright yellow flowered sundress, but the sentiment on her poster is hardly so sunny: “Why Should I Study For a Future I Won’t Have?” She thinks about climate change every day, she tells me. She reads “about how we’re on the brink” and hears her teachers and parents tell her that it’s up to her generation to fix things. “I don’t understand why I should be in school if the world is burning,” she says. “What’s the point of working on my education if we don’t deal with this first?”... Underlying their anger, though, is another a-word: anxiety. And it’s something they’re increasingly voicing. Teachers hear their students talk about panic attacks when wildfires break out, and psychologists face young patients weeping about their fear of never having a family. Amber Bray recalls Colin solemnly telling her on his eighth birthday, “My life would be better without climate change.”... In a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of American teenagers released in September, 57 percent said that climate change made them feel scared and 52 percent said it made them feel angry, both higher rates than among adults. Just 29 percent of teens said they were optimistic. Reports like the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment have cited mental health concerns as a side effect of climate change. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement in 2015 warning that climate change poses threats to “children’s mental and physical health,” and that “failure to take prompt, substantive action would be an act of injustice to all children.”... “Eco-anxiety” or “climate depression” is playing out in real terms among young people, sometimes in extreme ways: A 2008 study in an Australian medical journal chronicled the case of a 17-year-old boy who was hospitalized after refusing to drink water during a nationwide drought, in what the authors called the first case of “climate change delusion.” A psychiatrist I interviewed told me a patient had confessed that she secretly wished a pandemic would strike to ease stress on the planet... According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 1 in 3 people ages 13 to 18 experience an anxiety disorder, and a study published in April 2018 in the Journal of Development and Behavioral Pediatrics found that anxiety diagnoses in children ages 6 to 17 increased 20 percent between 2007 and 2012. There’s no single cause: A nonstop barrage of social media, a heightened political climate and the threat of school shootings are all stressors. And that’s on top of being a teenager, with all the tumult that entails... When young people seize on the U.N. warning that governments need to take action in 12 years to conclude, incorrectly, that the planet has only a decade remaining (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last year that millennials fear “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change”), or when the website of the U.K.-based activist group Extinction Rebellion warns that “societal collapse and mass death are seen as inevitable by scientists and other credible voices,” it can be terrifying. Some voices are now sounding the alarm about alarmism, suggesting that we’d all be better off if we dialed down some of the hyperbole... Many of the adults I talked to said the heightened rhetoric around climate change reminded them of the panic around nuclear weapons during the Cold War... Michael Shellenberger, an author and founder of the California-based nonprofit Environmental Progress, which promotes nuclear energy, remembers how panicked he felt after watching the movie. Now, he considers it “bizarre” that adults would have decided “to traumatize teenagers with that.” Today, he says, some in the environmental movement are making climate change “the new apocalypse.” “These scenarios of apocalypse, of really cataclysmic climate change that people are scaring children around, are in the realm of an extreme, unpredictable event,” he told me. He has reflected on eco-anxiety while observing his 14-year-old daughter and her friends grow more worried about the planet; his book on the topic, “Apocalypse Never,” is due out in June. He’s not advocating that children be shielded from the science, but rather that it be presented seriously. The headline-grabbing threats of mass extinctions and deaths may motivate action, he says, but at what cost?"
The same people who condemn religion as child abuse cheer this
This is basically blackmail: do what we demand or we will be emotionally traumatised. What if conservatives are traumatised by abortion?
I doubt covid made that patient who wanted a pandemic happy
Ukraine war: Germany turns to coal as Russia throttles gas supplies
Environmentalists will just double down and claim this shows that Germany didn't move onto "green" energy fast enough, and praise how they are continuing to move away from nuclear power
Pradheep J. Shanker on Twitter - "Trump made some outrageous claims about German energy at the UN — and the German delegation’s reaction was priceless"
"Who was wrong again?"
Significant lower share of renewable electricity in Germany in 2021 - "The share of renewable energies in gross electricity consumption will decline in 2021 – from 45.3 percent in 2020 back down to a level similar to 2019 of around 42 percent. This is the result of a preliminary evaluation by the office of the Working Group on Renewable Energy Statistics (AGEE-Stat) at the German Environment Agency (UBA). While total electricity consumption increased, five percent less electricity was generated from renewable sources than in the previous year due to weather conditions. There was extremely little wind in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020. In a year-on-year comparison, there were significantly fewer hours of sunshine. UBA President Dirk Messner said: “The German government's target of 80 per cent electricity from renewable sources in 2030 is central to climate protection and cannot be achieved at the current rate of expansion. The coalition agreement is right in claiming that we need effective measures quickly in the next few years to build more wind and photovoltaic plants.”"
Opinion: The alarm about climate change is blinding us to sensible solutions - The Globe and Mail - "When the UN asked almost 10 million people what they regarded as the world’s top priorities, the vast majority – especially from the world’s poor – emphasized better education, health care, jobs, government and nutrition. Climate ranked 16th out of 16 priorities – right after phone and internet access."
Clearly the solution is to "educate" people so they think climate change is the number one problem
Earth Day Is Irrelevant on Its 50th Anniversary - "most people in the world apparently do not agree, according to the UN’s 2015 My World poll. For the almost 10 million people who voted in the poll, “Action on climate change” ranked dead last (see below for April 22 screenshot of the poll results to date), despite the fact that the UN listed that priority first among issues to be selected from... 'even as global warming has received greater attention as an environmental problem from politicians and the media in recent years, Americans’ worry about it is no higher now than when Gallup first asked about it in 1989.' Most sensible people are environmentalists. We want clean air, land, and water and we hope that future generations will live in an even better world. Yet climate change now dominates, not just Earth Day, but the entire environmental movement, sucking funding and energies away from tackling real issues such as pollution reduction and species at risk. Besides the strategic blunder of focusing on an issue the general public does not really care much about, there is a serious ethical problem that will come back to haunt the movement as the public becomes better informed... global warming campaigners assert that “the science is settled.” We know for certain, they claim, that our carbon dioxide emissions will cause a planetary emergency unless we radically change our ways. This makes no sense, of course. Uncertainty is inherent to all sciences, especially one as complicated as climate change."
50 years after the first Earth Day, the planet’s doing pretty well - "Many Westerners are surprised to hear that the environment is improving. A lot. This surprise owes to an unfortunate flip side of the Earth Day legacy, which too often can focus on doom and gloom, making us despondent and driving poor policies. Early environmentalism from the 1970s helped focus societies on important environmental priorities such as polluted rivers — the Cuyahoga River even infamously caught fire in 1969 — and fouled air, with soot and smog killing millions... But curiously, this isn’t our typical environmental conversation. We don’t emphasize enormous improvements, and we don’t focus on our vital, unfinished business in water and air quality. Instead, the standard story is how the environment is getting ever worse — how we’re hurtling toward catastrophe. This tradition also started with Earth Day. By 1970, many leading environmentalists were predicting the end of the world. Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich was perhaps the leading apocalypse proponent. For Earth Day, he predicted that environmental deterioration would kill 65 million Americans, and that globally, 4 billion would die before the year 2000. Life magazine also saw impending doom, predicting air pollution would be so bad that Americans would have to wear gas masks by the 1980s — and that pollution would block half the sunlight. Not only were these predictions spectacularly wrong, but they were outlandish when first made. Yet in a world where more alarm gets more attention, they started a trend of framing environmental issues in worst-case ways. The tone scares, it depresses — and it likely skews our focus and spending. Today, climate change takes up the vast majority of the environmental conversation, and it is definitely a real problem. However, it also is too often framed in exaggerated fashion, with predictable results: A new survey shows that almost half of humanity believes global warming likely will make humans extinct. This is entirely unwarranted. The UN Climate Panel finds that the overall impact of global warming by the 2070s will be equivalent to a 0.2 to 2 percent loss in average income. That is a problem. It isn’t the end of the world. Such fear also makes us prioritize poorly. Climate change mitigation today costs more than $400 billion each year in renewable subsidies and other costly climate policies. Yet, we spend much less on making water and air cleaner for the billions with basic needs."
The same people who mock doomsday cults for cognitive dissonance keep predicting the end of the world. At least doomsday cults are different each time - but environmentalism has been a lot more constant over the last 50 years
Bjorn Lomborg: This Earth Day let's replace alarmism with smarter policy - "Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that, along with other environmental concerns, climate change could cause worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse. Such irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future. The evidence actually shows that climate-related disasters are killing far fewer people than ever before. Over the past century, the number of dead from floods, droughts, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures has dropped by an incredible 98 per cent. And the much-discussed 2030 deadline to fix climate change is wrong, too. It relies on an arbitrary policy that no major nation is actually pursuing. Moreover, the claim of apocalypse is vastly exaggerated. The UN Climate Panel estimates that the average person in half a century will be 363 per cent as rich as today. When they include all the impacts of climate change, the increase in well-being will instead be equivalent to 356 percent of today’s incomes. That is a problem, not the end of the world... The Paris agreement is phenomenally expensive, costing US$1-2 trillion every year by 2030. But even if all nations actually kept their promises, including Barack Obama’s for the U.S., and also stuck to them through the rest of the century, the impact would be an almost immeasurable 0.19°C reduction in temperatures by the end of the century. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit: each dollar spent would avoid just 11 cents worth of global climate damage. But there is another cost to excessively focusing on climate in a world that is full of problems. COVID-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself fell prey, which is perhaps one of the reasons it seemed to be blindsided by coronavirus. When U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy warns us that climate is the “most significant public health challenge of our time” she effectively ignores much bigger health problems. A third of all U.S. deaths are caused by cardiovascular disease and more than a quarter by cancer. In comparison, just a third of one per cent are caused by heat deaths — compared to the almost seven per cent who die from cold each year. Extreme weather kills just 0.015 per cent. The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges: starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar spent can help much more. Spending just a thousandth of the cost of the Paris agreement could save more than a million people from dying of tuberculosis. Each dollar would do more than a thousand times more good than when spent poorly on climate. Similarly, we could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with just a fraction of what we’re spending on climate... we certainly shouldn’t ramp up, our massive subsidies to inefficient electric cars and solar and wind power"
