Michael O'Fallon - Sovereign Nations on X - "In 2023, fourteen major American cities agreed to a globalist climate accord with an undeniably dystopian objectives for the near future of the country. This objective entails the elimination (or substantial restrictions) of meat and dairy consumption, private vehicle ownership, air travel, and clothing purchases by 2023. The C40 Cities (Cities 4 Net Zero) Climate Leadership Group aims to achieve this vision by 2030. Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Seattle have all committed to this goal. The plan involves Balkanizing the United States to establish feudalism. Different ethnicities, faith-based groups, and lifestyle communities will form their own autonomous zones. Consequently, there will be a significant economic contraction, leading to de-growth for what remains of America as distributism becomes the new economic model. Below is a chart of C40 City 2030 Net-Zero targets ๐"
Animal Farm on X - "I bet some people can fly more! To conferences deciding what else the little people will sacrifice."
TrueWest on X- "So many of my progressive acquaintances simply refuse to accept this. Everything is a 'trumpy conspiracy' to them."
Modern sumptuary laws strike again
Germany accused of 'policy madness' after hiking airline passenger tax - "A group of the world’s largest airlines have warned that a 19pc jump in Germany’s aviation levies will damage the country’s economy and erode the industry’s ability to hit net zero... IATA said the tax rise – first announced in December – will make German exports, tourism and jobs market less competitive, while also holding back the recovery of the country’s air transport sector. The recovery of Germany’s air sector post-Covid has been one of the slowest in Europe, as the country’s international passenger numbers are still down 20pc compared to pre-pandemic."
Steve Milloy on X - "Germany raises air travel taxes by almost 20% to dissuade people from flying to meet net zero goals. Net zero will never be reached, but in trying to reach it, governments will crush your standard of living. Count on it."
Dr Jordan B Peterson on X - "That's the plan, man. Read the bloody C40 documents: one short haul flight per person every three years; three articles of clothing per person per year; a 95% reduction in private care ownership (so you won't be able to drive, or fly); and the complete elimination of meat consumption. And what, may you ask, is C40? Nothing less than an organize consortium of forty of the world's biggest cities. Their stunningly destructive and counterproductive agenda is being pushed hard by leftist radicals like @SadiqKhan , who is going to destroy London. Find everything you need here: https://c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/C40-strategic-recommendations-guidelines?language=en_US#:~:text=C40%20declarations%20(also%20known%20as,including%20buildings%2C%20transportation%20and%20waste. The municipal government utopians have explicitly stated their intent to eliminate all of your freedom and choice. The worship of nature, boys and girls, requires the sacrifice of you and your children. Wake the hell up. Time is ticking away, and things at the moment are not looking good."
Climate activists are holding back climate progress - "It was recently announced that the 29th Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 29) will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan later this year. Following COP 27 in Egypt and COP 28 in the United Arab Emirates, it represents the third consecutive climate change conference hosted by an authoritarian oil and gas-producing state. One could point out the obvious hypocrisy on the part of the global climate establishment, but that seems almost too easy. Perhaps the more interesting question is why these countries want to host the conferences in the first place. It’s not because they’re motivated by a deep will for global betterment. It’s because they understand that today’s economics, particularly in energy and natural resources, is heavily shaped by climate policy. Yet the role of economics in climate change action has been somewhat subordinated here in the West in favour of the tortured theme of climate justice. We see for instance climate advocates in Western countries engaging in demonstrations and displays of rebellion that historically would have been used to protest major human rights issues. In Canada, thoughtful climate action similarly seems to be impossible without the inclusion of social justice, including issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Last year a private member’s bill (Bill C-226) which calls for a “national strategy to assess, prevent and address environmental racism and to advance environmental justice” passed third reading in the House of Commons. On the international front, the International Institute of Environment and Development has championed the goal of queering climate justice, including how “climate justice has drawn from and built on ideologies from different right-based movements…including civil rights, queer rights, and women’s rights.” We can also see this trend in Western business and financial institutions as the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement promotes investments that are valued based on their environmental and social effects. Questions about profitability or broader economic value can be subordinated to social justice or climate considerations. The net result is that a lot of contemporary climate policy seems to be driven more by emotion than hard-headed thinking including cost-benefit analysis, the relative costs of different approaches, and a lot of deficit-financed spending by Western governments. These actions may lower emissions but at tremendous economic costs. Countries like Egypt, the UAE, and Azerbaijan are thinking about climate change quite differently. They understand that global action on climate change is influencing real economic change. These developments are now manifesting themselves for instance in global commodity markets and future investment strategies... Policymakers cannot forget that the greatest reductions in carbon emissions have come from technological shifts driven by market forces, not through virtue signaling or social activism... Re-centering policy development on the economics of climate change is likely to resonate more with the new climate dialogues taking place in countries like Egypt, the UAE, and Azerbaijan. This trend has shown us that these nations are ready to come to the table and discuss our energy and climate future but within a framework that recognizes that these are fundamentally economic questions. This is the best means to achieve climate progress at the lowest cost and in turn to maintain public support for the types of changes that we’ll need to pursue in the coming years. The West needs to stop conflating climate progress with the trappings of social progressivism and refocus on how the dismal yet ultimately valuable science can be best integrated into climate policymaking."
The left hate the market, so
German transport minister under fire for weekend driving ban threat - "German Transport Minister Volker Wissing attracted backlash on Friday after threatening to impose weekend driving bans in the summer to abide by the climate protection law, in the latest dispute within Berlin's ruling coalition over decarbonising... According to the current climate protection law, the ministry responsible for underperforming sectors must launch an immediate program to put them back on track... For months, the government coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and pro-business FDP has been in negotiations about the amendments but has not yet reached an agreement. In a push to get his coalition partners to quickly approve the changes, Wissing said the ministry would have to enforce a ban on driving to meet the current law requirements if the amendments do not come into force before mid-July... The letter was heavily criticized by the coalition partners and environmental groups as irresponsible scaremongering at a time when Germans' appetite for more green policy has seemed subdued."
When the reality of climate change hysteria becomes apparent. To be "responsible", brutal measures must be enforced by diktat, without allowing "climate change deniers" to point out the problems
The great climate change fallacy - "all these stories share one thing: they are based on the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario. It’s not an exciting name, but 8.5 is often described as “business as usual”. Hence the headlines. RCP 8.5 is not business as usual, though; it’s an unlikely worst case. This means a large fraction of the public debate on climate change mitigation is driven by an increasingly implausible scenario, which was unlikely when it was proposed, and is even less so now. The more we focus on this scenario, though, the more pessimistic — and the more hopeless — the situation will seem... of the four RCPs, only 8.5 imagined a world with no climate policy. And second, its authors described it as “a high-emission business as usual scenario” – meaning that it was at the high end of emissions for business as usual, but which was taken to mean in some quarters that high emissions were business as usual. So RCP 8.5 became synonymous with “business as usual”. There are dozens of studies published every year describing it as such... “The problem isn’t that people study these scenarios,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s that they frame them as the most likely outcome in the absence of policy. That was probably never true, but I’m sure it’s not true now.” Most obviously, we don’t live in a world without climate policies... So “business as usual” is a global effort to reduce emissions. Second, and most important, the world has changed its energy mix far faster than RCP 8.5 expected... the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the faster plants grow, and the more they suck from the atmosphere. That’s a negative feedback system, and it tends to moderate changes... there’s an ongoing row among academics about whether RCP 8.5 (and its equally pessimistic successor) should be used at all... There’s also a risk that RCP 8.5 will crowd out research into other areas. For instance, Our World in Data’s recent efforts to understand human impacts on biodiversity have been hampered because almost all the research into coral reef collapse has been carried out using RCP 8.5. Predictably enough, all the coral dies in that scenario. But what would coral reefs look like under 2°C of warming, or 3°C? We don’t really know... if the IPCC puts out RCPs without explicitly saying which are the most likely, then policymakers and journalists will take whichever scenario most suits their needs, whether that’s pretending there’s no problem, or magnifying the problem for the sake of a headline. This isn’t the fault of climate modellers. But no one involved in the IPCC is explicitly saying “RCP 8.5 is pretty unlikely,” and that fateful phrase “business as usual” is still attached to it. Hausfather has a solution for this: attach explicit percentage likelihoods to the different scenarios – say that RCP 4.5 is 45% probable, or RCP 8.5 is 5% probable. They’d be necessarily subjective but at least it would show that no one thinks they’re all equally likely, or that RCP 8.5 is the course we’re already on. Betts agrees... we’re not in the “last chance saloon”, if that means that we face some inevitable catastrophe, or 5-1 down and facing ruinous defeat; and the politicians at COP26 are not guilty of facilitating a worse genocide than Hitler’s. Archbishop Welby apologised for that. But it’s an understandable mistake if he’s always being told that “business as usual” means a march to doom."
Prepare to get poorer - "What’s being touted as an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector has significant potential to become a prosperity cap for Canadians and Indigenous communities... The recently released Regulatory Framework for an Oil and Gas Sector Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cap is problematic for two main reasons: the first is that it fails a reasonableness test on sound public policy; but more importantly, it has high potential to create significant unintended consequences on prosperity because instead of capping emissions, it will likely cap prosperity through deterred investment and a potential production cut. Most Canadians are supportive of decreasing pollution and GHG emissions, and I am too. But not at the price of a lower standard of living. The inaccurate and unrealistic assumptions used to develop the cap will deter investment given its complexity and uncompetitiveness. No other country in the world has placed this kind of limitation on its resource sector. Investment will therefore go elsewhere, and the emissions reductions investments in Canada will not occur, costing jobs, incomes, and tax revenues. Even more negatively, the cap may very likely force the oil and gas sector to cut production to comply and avoid jail time (yes, potential jail time). Fewer fossil fuels will be produced. “What’s wrong with that?” you might ask. Well, given the size of the sector to our prosperity, there’s a lot wrong with that. The oil and gas sector is by far Canada’s largest economic sector, larger than the automotive and banking sectors combined, in terms of GDP. It is the largest component of Canada’s exports, accounting for about 30 percent of the value of all activity. And it represents $12 billion in annual federal and provincial revenues. The Conference Board of Canada recently modeled the impact of production cuts because of the cap. They found that it would lead to a one-time but permanent drop in Canadian economic activity of $22-40 billion. That is the provincial budgets of Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia combined. The report also noted that 82,000-152,000 jobs would be lost across many sectors and across the country. Wages would drop by an equivalent of $22,600 for every working Canadian. But, most importantly for broad prosperity, federal government revenues would decline $82-150 billion cumulatively between 2030 and 2040. That means fewer public services, less money for health care, social programs, and the well-being of Canadians. That is how a production cap becomes a prosperity cap. All this will drive public tension. Much of the stress in Canadian society now is being driven by affordability issues. People are struggling to pay for food, rent, and necessities. For many Canadians, the idea of buying a home seems out of reach, people feel they might end up worse off than their parents, and many also feel poorer than they did a few short years ago. And they are right. Canadians’ standard of living has been stagnant for years and is currently below 2018 levels—and falling. A recent comparison of the top 26 countries in the world found that Canada ranks third from last in terms of real prosperity for average people: measured as how much you can buy for every hour worked (per capita GDP, purchasing power parity, adjusted for hours worked, for the economist crowd). On the second broad critique, the cap is simply poorly crafted public policy. Good public policy is clear, efficient, fair, competitive, and doesn’t pick winners and losers. This policy fails every one of those tests. It is an unnecessary and punitive layer on top of Canada’s existing carbon pricing scheme, which has been endorsed by industry and the country’s most prominent and thoughtful economists and experts. The limits are based on unrealistic production projections and assumptions regarding the build-out of emissions reductions technologies and investments. Sadly, it will serve to continue the tension between Alberta and the federal government since it is mostly oriented towards a single industrial activity largely happening in one part of the country. Finally, and more tragically, it will penalize Indigenous communities wanting to build a better future by participating in Canada’s resource sector opportunities. This list of policy assumptions, conditions, and likely outcomes gets a failing grade. Instead, Canada’s emissions reduction policy should follow five key principles: cost-efficiency; simplicity and clarity; sector agnostic; regional fairness; and globally competitive"
Clearly, damaging climate change policy destroying the economy shows that capitalism has failed
Hannah Ritchie: ‘Doomsday predictions are a dream for climate deniers’ - "I grew up with climate change. I don’t really remember a time when it wasn’t talked about, so I became obsessed with it – a big part of my life was worrying about it. Then I went to university and that was all I was studying. The environmental metrics were getting worse and worse. I was also assuming that extreme poverty and hunger must be getting worse. This fed into the notion that humans were incapable of solving problems. A key turning point was discovering the work of [Swedish physician and academic] Hans Rosling. He did these Ted Talks, mainly focusing on human metrics, where he would show how the world was changing, through data. And it turned out that most of the human wellbeing metrics that I’d assumed to be getting worse were actually getting better... there’s often this message coming through that there’s nothing we can do about it: it’s too late, we’re doomed, so just enjoy life. That’s a very damaging message – because it’s not true, and there’s no way that it drives action. The other thing about doomsday predictions is that they’re a dream for climate deniers, who weaponise poor forecasts and say: “Look, you can’t trust the scientists, they’ve got this wrong before, why should we listen to them now?”
Meme - ๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข๐ข @hankgreen: "US per capita CO2 emissions now at 1913 levels. In 1913 only 1% of Americans had indoor plumbing and electricity ๐ฎ
Correction: This is tricky and the data aren't great, but after searching around a bunch, I think a better estimate is that between 10% and 20% of Americans had electricity and indoor plumbing by 1913. American "homes" had a significantly smaller percentage, but lots of Americans lived in large buildings in cities that electrified faster."
Proof that we need to destroy the economy and immiserate the population to save the planet
Gen Z activists have swapped planet for Palestine - "If I were living in Peckham and about to be relocated by the seaside in Dorset, I would be pretty angry with a mob which turned up and slashed the tyres of the coach which had been assigned to take me there. Leaving that aside, it’s hard not to notice a distinct switch in the targets of Lefty protesters over the past few months. They seem to have lost interest in protesting about climate change and have switched to Palestine and asylum-seekers instead. The shift can be dated to last November during a protest held in Amsterdam, when Greta Thunberg suddenly seemed to decide that the planet was no longer worthy of her complete attention. She told the crowd that there “can be no climate justice on occupied land”, before blathering on about Palestine. It didn’t please one of her fans, who stormed the stage and seized her microphone, but as ever with Greta she seemed to manage to set a trend. In the months since we have seen fewer and fewer climate protests as progressive mobs find other things to work themselves up about instead. Never mind that we are supposedly heading for climate Armageddon if we don’t abandon all oil and gas more or less instantly, a more urgent injustice seems to be that asylum seekers are being taken out of three star hotels and housed on a barge instead – a barge which, by the way, seemed to be perfectly adequate in its previous incarnation as accommodation for oil workers (although I guess in the minds of climate activists they needed to be punished). It is too much to hope that climate activists have finally come to realise that the ‘climate action’ they were calling for – Extinction Rebellion’s original demand was that the world reach net zero by 2025 – would have condemned many billions of people to live in unimaginable poverty. Neither, I suspect, have they come round to appreciating that their claim that climate change will make the world ‘uninhabitable’ is just a tad over the top. I doubt whether most climate activists really ever had much of an interest in the climate at all. It was just a vehicle which they could use to satisfy their emotional need to lash out against something – anything... But the Left is getting out of climate protesting just in time. Net zero is collapsing around us as more and more ordinary people begin to realise that to achieve it by 2050 is a hopelessly impractical target which would impose vast costs on them... If you want to be on trend with your protesting, better opportunities now lie elsewhere."
Yet more evidence that activism is pastime and a form of left wing self-actualisation rather than being about high-minded ideals
SNP mocked for replacing flagship green target with 'accelerated' plan - "Humza Yousaf and his Green coalition partners have been mocked after insisting they were pursuing an “accelerated response to the climate emergency” by abandoning a greenhouse gas target. The First Minister admitted that his government was scrapping Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 after experts warned it was unachievable. He said it would be replaced by “an accelerated climate change proposal and plan”, including a controversial measure to impose a new carbon tax on large country estates... there was widespread hilarity among opposition MSPs when Ariane Burgess, a Green backbencher, asked Mr Yousaf “how the Scottish Government plans to accelerate action to ensure that Scotland achieves net zero by 2045”. Presiding officer Alison Johnstone, Holyrood’s version of the Commons Speaker, was forced to intervene as the chamber erupted with laughter... Jamie Livingstone, the head of Oxfam Scotland, said: “The Scottish Government’s abandonment of its legal 2030 and annual emissions reduction targets is a reprehensible retreat caused by its recklessly inadequate level of action to date.” He added: “The announcement of largely recycled measures represents baby steps forward rather than the giant leaps needed and are a thinly veiled distraction from ministers’ failure to deliver their existing climate commitments.” Imogen Dow, the head of campaigns for Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “SNP and Green ministers choosing to scrap these climate commitments is the worst environmental decision in the history of the Scottish Parliament.” Ms Sturgeon boasted that her SNP administration was a global leader on climate change when the targets were introduced in 2019, saying they were the “most stretching” in the world. But the UK’s official climate watchdog said last month that the current rate of progress in cutting greenhouse gases would have to be increased by a factor of nine for the 2030 target to be met. In a report, the Climate Change Committee said this level of increase was “beyond what is credible” and was double the most “ambitious” scenario it had modelled if stringent measures were introduced. The assessment found Scotland’s annual target for cutting emissions was missed again in 2021 – for the eighth time in the last 12 years – after greenhouse gas levels rose by 2.4 per cent as the economy rebounded from the pandemic."
Labour plots new net zero crackdown on corporates - "Labour is plotting to introduce new net zero laws that will force big companies and banks to limit their carbon footprint to comply with UN climate goals... It could potentially mean companies could only get loans if they were “climate compliant.”... a legal requirement to ensure corporate actions are limiting global temperature rises sets a higher bar and will also leave businesses open to lawsuits and possible government censure should they fall short... Mr Miliband said the UK’s energy crisis would only be ended by breaking the dependence on fossil fuels. He said: “Every day we remain exposed to fossil fuels is another day families, businesses and our national economy are at risk, paying the price. Clean energy is the only way to end this cost of living crisis once and for all.”"
When "clean energy" raises energy costs even more, the climate change hystericists will double down and claim there isn't enough of it, because everyone "knows" that it's the cheapest form of energy, because cost per unit of installed capacity is clearly overall system costs
Don't buy the latest climate-change alarmism - "In contrast to the hyperventilating media, the report is actually serious and sensible (and very, very long). It doesn’t surprise, since it is a summary of already-published studies... You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year. Likewise, we have heard a lot about flooding in Germany and elsewhere being caused by climate change. But the new UN report tells us it has “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale” — and low confidence in attributing “changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events.” The report tells us that the evidence isn’t there to say floods are caused or driven by climate change. It also mentions climate upsides like the fact that more CO₂ in the atmosphere has acted as a fertilizer and created a profound global greening of the planet. One NASA study found that over a period of 35 years, climate change has added an area of green equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States. But don’t expect to read about this in any of the breathless articles on climate impact. The UN report only deals with the physical impact of climate change, but of course, much of what really matters is how humans handle this. Often the real problem of rising sea levels is converted into a catastrophe by arguing that nobody will adapt and everyone will drown or be displaced. Remember when news reports told us that rising seas will displace an astonishing 187 million people, potentially “drowning” entire cities like Miami in 80 years? In reality, humans adapt, as Holland has shown. That’s why many models show that adaptation will reduce the number of flooded people 12,000-fold. As in the past, rising prosperity will continue to reduce flood impacts, and climate change will merely slow down this reduction slightly. Ultimately, this is why the scare stories on climate impacts are vastly overblown and not supported by this new climate report...
After this column was published, an organization called Climate Feedback posted a fact check... Most of the fact check discussing points I did not make, about other deaths that could be attributable to climate change, or accusing me of climate change denialism — which isn’t true."
From 2021
Apocalypse porn - "Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change... The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.)... There is a creepily Biblical undertone to a lot of the apocalypse porn spreading through the media... There is a strange glee, too, in these warnings of End Times. Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we’re doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don’t alter our habits... There are many grating things about the recent surge in eco-apocalypse porn. The first is the sheer opportunism, the speed with which every natural calamity – regardless of whether it can actually be linked to climate change – is politicised and exploited. Every fire and flood is turned into a horror film that the West’s bored middle classes then use to promote their drab green agenda. Then there’s the way apocalypse porn lets various political establishments off the hook. Treating every disparate natural event as proof of the existence of an all-seeing, all-punishing global monster called ‘climate change’ absolves local politicians of responsibility for tackling natural crises. For example, if the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don’t need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It’s not Brussels’ fault – it’s your fault for driving to Sainsbury’s in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan’s failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media’s obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon’s wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse – it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure. And, of course, there’s the dishonesty of it all, the way all this talk of manmade Weather of Mass Destruction wilfully overlooks the fact that we are in less danger from nature than ever before... Progress – so loathed by extreme greens – has made us safer. It hasn’t destroyed nature, but it has helped to protect us from nature’s violent whims. The apocalypse porn of the past few weeks captures just how regressive the ideology of environmentalism has become. This is a fearful and increasingly hysterical worldview. It promotes a fact-lite narrative about humanity’s allegedly baleful impact on the planet and exaggerates the risks we face from nature. Worst of all, it explicitly demotes what ought to be the great, galvanising goal of humankind – the liberation of every human being from poverty – in favour of insisting that progress has gone too far, economic growth must be reversed, and we must all settle for less"
As Dawkins noted, the retreat of Christianity has opened the way to worse
