The Hill Is Wrong, Climate Change Is Grossly Overemphasized as a Factor Causing Wildfires
Near the top of a Google news search for the phrase “climate change” today turns up a story in The Hill claiming the media is failing to properly place the blame for wildfires on climate change. This is false. Hundreds of stories over the past two years alone have blamed climate change for wildfires. To be accurate, they are all wrong. Data do not show a significant increase in the number of wildfires or the acreage burned by them. As a result, rather than underrepresenting climate change as a cause of wildfires, the mainstream media is, in fact, giving misplaced emphasis on climate change as a factor in wildfires.
In The Hill story, “Media coverage of wildfires omits one key element: Humanity’s role,” the author writes:
Global media outlets cover [large wildfires] like the disasters they are, but too few point out that human-driven climate change is their shared accelerant. … We are burning our own house down. If we’re to survive, we need to acknowledge our pyromaniacal role now.
While wildfires occur every year and are an important element of functioning ecosystems, the scale of 2021 fires naturally raises questions about their relationship to climate change.
Since June of 2019, at the beginning of the first wildfire season for which Climate Realism was in existence, Climate Realism has refuted more than 46 news stories, for instance, here, here, here, here, here, and here, claiming supposed human caused climate change was causing more frequent and more severe wildfires. The data does not support these stories’ claims. Yet each of the false wildfire stories Climate Realism refuted, or versions thereof, have been published and republished in hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and science journals over the past two years.
Contrary to false news stories, NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. NASA reports satellites have measured a 25-percent decrease in global lands burned since 2003. That is an objective scientific fact.
Also, as reported in Climate at a Glance: Wildfires, U.S. acres burned each year are much fewer now – even in our worst years – than was the case in the early 20th century. This is an inconvenient scientific fact that the United States government has since sought unsuccessfully to erase.
While media outlets like The Hill may choose to push false climate alarm about human climate change causing wildfires, and claim that the media underreports on this, the facts show just the opposite. Because the data show wildfires are not increasing in number or intensity, any story that reports otherwise is one too many.
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Carbon taxes advance liberal policies without helping climate
Lurking inside the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation package working its way through Capitol Hill is a series of carbon tax proposals advanced by political figures who invoke climate change as a rationale for higher energy costs.
Democrats operating in partnership with the Biden White House have refused to move forward with the $1 trillion infrastructure bill unless their progressive policy priorities are passed as part of the reconciliation process.
While details remain vague about the climate change initiatives included as extra spending with reconciliation, a leaked list of what Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee call “carbon pricing” gives some indication of what this agenda will cost families and businesses. Apparently, the senators are eyeballing “a per-ton tax on carbon dioxide of leading fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas) upon extraction, starting at $15 per ton and escalating over time,” a “tax per ton of carbon dioxide emissions assessed on major industrial emitters (e.g. steel, cement chemicals),” and “a per-barrel tax on crude oil,” according to the document.
The American Energy Alliance, a free market-oriented consumer advocacy nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., has produced an analysis of the proposals that concludes carbon taxes would boost energy prices for families and businesses. Since fossil fuels, including oil, natural gas, and coal, make up almost 80% of America’s energy mix, it’s not hard to understand why.
“A carbon tax will drive up costs for transportation, electricity, industry, commercial activity, and everything else that relies upon oil, natural gas, or coal to deliver goods or services,” AEA explained in its analysis. “To put this into everyday terms, a 15-dollar tax on oil translates loosely to a 15-cent increase in the price of gasoline per gallon.”
But what about climate change? Is it worth raising the price of carbon in the short term in exchange for long-term climate benefits as federal lawmakers seem to suggest?
Not according to the CO2 Coalition , a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that includes dozens of scientists devoted to highlighting the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions.
“More carbon dioxide levels will help everyone, including future generations of our families. CO2 is the essential food for land-based plants,” the coalition says on its website . “The Earth’s biosphere has experienced a relative CO2 famine for millions of years, and the recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life. Future CO2 increases will boost farm productivity, improve drought resistance, bolster food security and help create a greener, lusher planet.”
The coalition has also called attention to the failure of climate models to forecast the actual level of global warming, which has been much more modest than what has been observed. Gregory Wrightstone, a geologist who serves as executive director of the coalition, has made this point while offering testimony in Pennsylvania, where Gov. Tom Wolf has advanced regulations that would enable the commonwealth to join a “cap and trade” multistate climate change agreement known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Wrightstone described the initiative as a “carbon taxation scheme” that would devastate Pennsylvania’s economy without producing any discernible benefits.
What’s true at the state level is also applicable at the national level. In their examination of a proposed “cap and trade” plan from the Obama years, researchers with the Heritage Foundation found that if the United States halted all economic activity and somehow cut all carbon emissions, this effort would reduce average temperatures “by no more than 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.” That’s so small to the point that it’s immeasurable.
The reconciliation package also reportedly calls for a “carbon border tax” that would impose fees raising the cost of goods coming into the U.S. Team Biden is of the view that this will discourage carbon emissions in foreign countries while giving certain U.S. companies a competitive boost.
But the real losers will be consumers who will pay taxes on imported items such as food, clothing, construction materials, electronics, cars, and other everyday items. The economic pain will be particularly acute for those on fixed incomes who will pay a higher percentage of that income on energy costs.
Anti-carbon initiatives may not do much for the climate, but they offer an ideal avenue for progressive politicians to exert greater government control.
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New Credit Card Cuts Off Spending Once You Hit Your CO2 Max
Doconomy’s ‘premium’ DO Black card goes beyond tracking the CO2 emissions of your purchases — it stops from you spending as soon as you reach your monthly, UN-determined CO2 limit.
The company that created a credit card to track your purchases’ CO2 emissions is set to launch a “premium” version of the card that cuts off your spending as soon as you hit your “carbon max.”
This is the latest of many schemes to force major changes in human behaviour to allegedly lessen global warming. Social scientist and author Steven Mosher has called the global warming movement a “giant propaganda effort” and “the biggest scientific fraud ever perpetrated on the family of man.”
Doconomy has partnered with Mastercard and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to create technology for the everyday consumer that “connects the purchase price of a product with the effect on the planet measured in Kg CO2, and then recommends the amount to offset – practically putting a price on carbon,” as the Doconomy website explains.
The DO credit card works hand-in-hand with a phone app, launched in April 2019, that quantifies the CO₂ emissions generated from each credit card transaction. The website introduces the card with video footage of whitewashed, typical consumer goods floating, like trash, as if through space, each labeled with a carbon emissions number.
The back of the card reads underneath the signature authorization area, “I’m taking responsibility for every transaction I make to help protect our planet.”
Doconomy will soon release a “premium” version of the credit card, called DO Black, touting it as “the first credit card ever to stop you from overspending.”
Measured against the UN goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030, DO Black “comes with a monthly tCO2e limit, ensuring that we stick to the UN-2030-recommended cuts in carbon,” the website reads.
“Instead of introducing a premium credit card with benefits that typically encourages further consumption, Do Black only has one essential feature – a carbon limit. The core purpose is the ability, not only to measure the impact of your consumption, but also to bring it to a direct halt,” the company stated.
The website currently features a sneak peek of the message the card user will be met with as soon as they hit their carbon max, complete with a red exclamation point warning: “Transaction denied! Carbon limit reached.”
Nathalie Green, the CEO and co-founder of Doconomy, views the card as a critical need: “We all need to come to terms with the urgency of the situation and rapidly move towards more responsible consumption. With Do Black there is no more excuses. Through our collaboration with UNFCCC and Mastercard, Do will enable people to do their part to contribute to the carbon reduction goals of 2030 and onwards,” she said.
The company revealed that they have partnered with the UN to participate in five “carbon dioxide reducing efforts,” or CO2 “offset” projects. Doconomy’s “climate smart savings account” also currently has a half-percent interest rate where “0.4 goes to our economy and 0.1 goes to the planet,” as “compensation” for the carbon impact.
As a company, Doconomy doesn’t limit itself to the creation of the DO credit cards but provides tools, using their “Åland Index,” to help other financial service providers and companies assess the “climate impact” of digital financial transactions, particular products, and even entire personal “lifestyles.”
Their goal is ambitious: “bring about structural change by rewiring the financial system,” as their website reads. Their services are already being used by the bank Klarna, which is providing “carbon impact calculations on all transactions by all users” through Doconomy’s Åland Index. This is being described as “the largest initiative ever taken by a bank in educating its users on the impact of consumption.”
While the card is currently being advertised for voluntary use, Marc Morano, founder and executive editor of what leftists call the “climate change denial” website Climate Depot, has predicted that this voluntary phase will have its own expiration date:
“This CO2 monitoring credit card will begin as a ‘voluntary’ measure with no ‘mandate.’ But how long until this CO2 card will be mandated by big corporations in collusion with governments? Given how the climate activists are aping the COVID lockdowns, expect this credit card to be mandatory under a ‘climate emergency.’”
Morano has noted that the DO card “follows on the heels” of an August 2021 Nature study “calling for ‘carbon allowances’ that would monitor individuals’ CO2 emissions through smart meters and tracking apps.”
He warned readers, “Get ready for a Chinese-style social credit system scoring when it comes to your personal spending habits.”
In response to a college professor’s “radical” proposal, shared by NPR, that people need to have fewer children because of the “prospect of climate catastrophe,” and that we need to decentivize procreation with a “carbon tax” on children in wealthy nations, Morano commented:
“U.S. environmentalists are taking a page from China’s mandatory one-child policy even as China abandons the policy. If these wacky climate activists believed their own literature they would realize that ‘global warming’ may lead to less kids!”
Steven Mosher agrees that the ultimate goal of global warmists is to dramatically decrease the world’s population. “They cheered China’s one-child policy from the very beginning,” he noted.
https://principia-scientific.com/new-credit-card-cuts-off-spending-once-you-hit-your-co2-max/
*****************************************Finkel defends huge Chinese CO2 emissions
Dr Alan Finkel was Australia’s Chief Scientist for five years until the end of last year. He was then appointed Special Adviser to the Australian Government on Low Emissions Technology
The fact that China had a net zero target for 2060 when the developed world had a target date of 2050 was “partly fairness and partly reality,” Dr Alan Finkel said.
The former Chief Scientist, speaking in a live forum with Joe Hildebrand, said China was bringing millions of people out of poverty, “and they deserve to improve their lifestyle”.
As a manufacturing powerhouse for the world, China’s ability to decarbonise was limited compared to some other countries, Dr Finkel said.
“They can do nothing immediately, or in percentage terms as rapidly, as the more developed countries,” he said.
Dr Finkel said it was true that China’s emissions were “huge and getting bigger”.
“They want to know that everybody’s pitching in. Everyone has to contribute,” he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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