“A serial killer of civilisations”: a history of climate change | HistoryExtra
"'[Renewables halted] in the 80s and then restarted in the early 90s. The lesson of this was that you know unless there's uh consistency in the pushing of the development of renewables, uh they aren't going to develop on a timeline as fast as they might. This leads to an important point.
The battle for climate change was lost in the early 90s. If the decade of the 80s was lost because the signal couldn't really be detached from the noise and because of uh Ronald Reagan just not being interested in the issue as an administration, not being interested in the issue, in the 90s the scientific knowledge about the dangers of climate change had advanced sufficiently that we we should have been doing something about it back then.
But the key factors that happened were that one the issue became politicized uh as the fossil fuel lobby began to realize that uh this was a likely a a threat to the fuels’ preeminence but secondly the industrialization of emerging nations, what was going to power them? This was the issue. If you recall in the early 90s, what China was just beginning its industrialization. The Federal Reserve dates uh it to 1988. So it was on, in 1990 China admitted from, uh fossil fuel emissions were a little less than half of the U.S emissions right? India much less than that. Uh the two largest nations on the planet. People knew back then that if China industrialized with coal it was going to have an impact on climate, they had the fourth largest coal reserves in the world. And so everybody was talking about leapfrogging technologies. I remember this.
And at the same time there was the beginning of the Kyoto process, the the process to come to some sort of an international agreement to contain greenhouse gas emissions. But China and India were resisting being held to the same restraints as the industrialized world ,because they were saying why should, you use coal, why shouldn't we? And why should, and you're the ones who have caused the problem, we didn't cause the problem. So we should be exempt. In any case all the developing nations were left out. The consequences of that, we're living with today, because China and India did industrialize. And China going from half our to greenhouse gas emissions, now is twice our greenhouse gas emissions and uh India is now the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world...
The European nations actually tried to hold to their commitments. They did so in part through accounting trickery. Um for instance the uh modernization of of East Germany once they were reunified was a tremendous benefit for uh for uh Germany and meeting it's it's, um its goals…
Why didn't China try to power its uh modernization industrialization through uh renewables rather than coal?... the U.S was giving them mixed messages. At the same time we were saying in meetings with them you've got to try uh renewables, we were pushing coal and still using coal to power our, a lot of our electrical generation and then there was an argument that has been offered today which was that renewables just weren't ready to supply the uh to step in at a cost-effective basis. To a degree that is true but in the book I use the analogy of a football coach who shoots his star player in the in the leg and then benches him because he's not able to play. The the reason renewables weren't ready was that we had a start and stop relationship with promoting renewables.
Most of the renewable energy strategies used, that we're using today whether it's solar, wind power, tidal power, were discussed back in the 19th century. And the early 20th century, in that era of at the end of the Victorian era when there was this tremendous technological hubris, steam-powered cars, electric cars were all invented. Uh solar power being used for agriculture in Egypt, wind power. And Thomas Edison um wanted to harvest the uh energy of the gulf's coast, the Gulf Stream which moves within 15 miles of the Atlantic coast at some points and he wanted to put impellers on the bottom of the Gulf Stream and generate electricity that way. So all these ideas, there was a veritable Renaissance and then what happened?
Well something better came along. That something better was oil… it's a fabulous fuel, the energy packed, that's highly transportable, it can turn into, all can power all sorts of different technologies, um and be turned into all sorts of kinds of lubricants and everything else, so it's this wonderful stuff… we had another opportunity in the early 90s and this is in the United States more than Europe I think. But power plants generally have a life of about 30 years, so a whole generation of power plants was reaching the end of their lives that were powered by coal in the uh in the US in the early 90s. What would power the next?
And so that everybody saw this, well let's let's move to renewables. Well at that point natural gas was very cheap and the turbines were getting that much more efficient for making power through natural gas, so essentially a new generation of power generation was installed with another 30-year life, postponing the dates for a lot of transition to renewables down the road, another generation…
The issue became politicized and when an issue becomes politicized um it's, the message doesn't matter. The facts don't matter if the messenger is deemed as illegitimate then nothing gets through. And of course we saw that today with covid denial, you know even as people are dying of the disease denying that it exists...
They devised this playbook and the playbook was, you know, dispute the science, attack the scientists’ motives, say there's no consensus, say it's unsettled, because actually if you can, that we need more study of the problem, and then say it is going to cost jobs and say it is, uh, going, that we have time. Most importantly that we have time.'"
The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Renewables are a failure so the solution is to double down even more
The key is to pretend that you hold the gospel truth and that anyone who disagrees is politicising the issue
"Accounting trickery" is anything that doesn't ruin the economy since that is the real aim
The comparison with covid is so ironically perfect, given covid hysteria and how liberals politicised it and ignored (and still ignore) the science
Ironically, the climate change hystericist playbook (like the covid hystericist playbook) is to pretend the science is settled, attack the scientists' motives, say there's a settled consensus, claim we don't need more study of the problem, pretend it will add jobs and claim we have no time since the world is ending (even though the prophecies are continually falsified)
