The Climate Change-Industrial Complex is an Existential Threat
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his Farewell Address, in which he warned that the United States must “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.” While Ike was correct in his assessment of the dangers posed by the military-industrial complex during the early years of the Cold War, a new, more dire threat to our nation has emerged in the years after the conclusion of the Cold War: the rise of the climate change-industrial complex.
As a matter of fact, the climate change-industrial complex, which will be explained below, began decades ago when scientists warned of “global cooling” and the coming of a modern ice age. Eventually, the global cooling “crisis” morphed into “global warming,” which then morphed again into what we now know as “climate change.”
Of course, as anyone who has taken middle-school science classes knows, the climate has always changed, and will always change. However, by adopting this vague, catchall term, those behind the climate change-industrial complex executed a rather brilliant bait-and-switch. Plus, utilizing the “climate change” narrative has allowed them to connect any and all “extreme” weather events and social justice causes to climate change, even though these connections are loosely affiliated, at best.
Like the military-industrial complex, which referred to the insidious relationship between the military, defense contractors, and government and their aim to constantly increase military spending, a similar dynamic exists today among the climate change-industrial complex.
However, instead of military officials banging the drums for more spending on national defense less we be overtaken by the Soviets, we now have a parade of so-called experts constantly calling for massive spending and the curbing of our fundamental liberties, less we be overtaken by “climate change.” And, in place of defense contractors, who stood to receive massive federal military contracts, we now have a whole host of cottage industries that benefit from the climate change-industrial complex. Of course, the role of government remains the same, supplying taxpayer money to fund these projects and programs while using its vast power to influence the public that such measures are necessary.
But, unlike the almost quaint military-industrial complex of yesteryear, today’s climate change-industrial complex has a far greater negative impact on our overall economy, way of life, and standard of living, while simultaneously threatening our personal freedoms, destroying our environment, and undermining our dignity.
In the name of “climate change,” our political leaders have run roughshod over our core constitutional freedoms, mandating what products we can buy and censoring those who dare to question the “climate change” narrative.
Meanwhile, countless corporations and “experts” have jumped on the “climate change” bandwagon, some for fear of retribution if they do not, with scores of others willingly doing so because they benefit in some form or fashion from the perpetuation of the “climate change crisis.”
Even worse, our government, via public schools and teacher unions, is pushing the “climate change” fearmongering down the throats of an entire generation, creating a giant cohort of future voters and leaders who buy the falsehood that “climate change” is an existential crisis hook, line, and sinker.
In reality, the climate change-industrial complex is nothing more than a Trojan horse, a guise under which the beneficiaries can implement their vision of how society should be “organized.”
Yet, we would be remiss to downplay the degree of the threat posed by those who seek to re-engineer society based on a nonexistent climate crisis. If we learned anything from the years-long horror show that was our government’s (and the world’s) response to COVID-19, we should be aware that many in the climate change-industrial complex viewed the incredible overreaction to a virus that posed a threat to a small percentage of the population as a trial run for what is too likely to come should they have their way in the future.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, laid bare that he believed “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” This would include, as Schwab put it, creating a new world order “that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building ‘green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.”
Of course, in Schwab’s vision, this new world order would also mean that people “own nothing,” eat bugs instead of meat, live in cramped “15-minute cities,” abstain from air travel, forgo driving (and owning, of course) gasoline-powered vehicles, along with a whole host of unfathomable sacrifices, all in the name of “climate change.” But -- and this is a vital point -- you can bet your bottom dollar that this new world order will not apply to those in positions of power, who make the rules, but conveniently for them, do not have to follow the very rules they make.
Before it is too late, those of us who will pay the ultimate price, both in a degraded standard of living and a less free and open society, must push back against the climate change-industrial complex. For if we do not, we may, as Ike warned, let “public policy… itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
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Era of ‘Unquestioned and Unchallenged’ Climate Change Claims Is Over
Leading voices in the climate community are in an uproar as their warming hypothesis comes under fresh assault by new scientific papers.
The authors of the papers are being attacked and say that “activist scientists” threatened by the new findings are “aggressively conducting an orchestrated disinformation campaign to discredit the papers and the scientific reputation of the authors.”
Indeed, from insults on social media and furious blog posts to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding emails from a journal editor and federal scientist, the controversy is getting heated.
Several scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed shock at the tactics used against those whose latest research is casting renewed doubts on the official climate narrative.
William Happer, Princeton professor emeritus of physics and former climate adviser to President Donald Trump, wasn't surprised by the response to the new findings.
“Of course the climate cult will be dismissive of any information—no matter how scientifically correct—that is politically incorrect," he told The Epoch Times, noting that the new findings made important and valid points.
The reason that climate activists are so upset is that the findings of the new papers—a trio of peer-reviewed studies by astrophysicist Willie Soon and dozens of other scientists from around the world—are casting further doubt on the narrative of man-made global warming.
The papers are also fueling even more public skepticism about the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the authors say ignores the facts as well as climate science more generally.
The rhetoric employed by taxpayer-funded scientists with a vested interest in the climate change narrative to attack the new research was profoundly unscientific, multiple scientists told The Epoch Times.
Atmospheric science professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, for instance, denounced the authors of one of the new papers as “a group of climate denier [clown emoji]” on X.
Mr. Mann, famous for the now-widely ridiculed “hockey stick” graph purporting to show massive man-made warming, also described the editor of the journal Climate as a “denier clown.”
Gareth S. Jones with the UK Met Office ridiculed the new studies as "nonsense," while smearing the journal publisher for supposedly being "popular with the science denial community."
Mr. Jones also denounced the guest editor of Climate’s special issue, Ned Nikolov, for having a "bit of a reputation, so much so that other climate contrarians distance themselves from him."
Mr. Nikolov authored an earlier paper arguing that atmospheric pressure, not greenhouse gases, plays a primary role in temperatures on Earth and on other celestial bodies.
Also chiming in to attack the new papers and the scientists behind them was Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who's using a FOIA request to demand all of Mr. Nikolov’s emails with relevant scientists.
“The only point of this paper (which every climate denier and their dog has jumped onto), is to launder dirty ‘science’ into a clean made-for-Fox meme,” Mr. Schmidt wrote on X before publishing a more detailed rebuttal on his blog Real Climate.
“The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old ‘it was the sun wot done it’ trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades,” argued Mr. Schmidt, whose federal salary is almost $200,000 per year. “There is literally nothing new under the sun.”
Scientists Respond
The blog post by Mr. Schmidt “is dismissive in an insubstantive way,” said climatologist Judith Curry, who wasn't involved in the new papers but previously served as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“The response by Schmidt, Mann, and others, particularly with regard to the FOIA request regarding editorial discussions on this paper, reflects their ongoing attempts to control the scientific as well as public dialogue on climate change,” she told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, their behavior not only reflects poorly on them but is damaging to climate science.”
Ms. Curry, author of "Climate Uncertainty and Risk," who has a post by the lead authors on her blog Climate Etc. to provide a forum for discussion, said the new paper raises “an important issue that is swept under the rug by the IPCC and many climate scientists.”
In particular, it has major implications for how 20th-century climate records are interpreted, she said.
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New York's Ban on Gas Stoves Hit With Lawsuit by Industry Groups
Several industry groups have filed a lawsuit to block New York's controversial state ban on gas stoves and furnaces that came as dozens of Democrat-controlled cities and local governments took similar measures to fight the supposed dangers of climate change.
The complaint, filed on Oct. 12 by the National Association of Home Builders, the National Propane Gas Association, and others, accuses New York state of violating federal law by banning gas stoves and other appliances in new buildings.
The plaintiffs, which also include several trade unions, argue that the ban is illegal because it conflicts with existing federal laws, and that its adoption would hurt businesses, spark layoffs, and trigger increases in energy prices.
"Hundreds of plumbers on Long Island rely on new construction to feed their families and pay their mortgages," Jimmy Russo, president of the Plumbing Contractors Association of Long Island, said in a statement. "This illegal law has basically ripped the rug out from underneath them."
Environmental groups criticized the lawsuit, citing climate change.
"Don’t believe the wealthy fossil fuel industry’s lies—lives, livelihoods, and wallets are already hugely impacted by climate change, and the All-Electric Buildings Act is critical to protecting all of these for New Yorkers,” a coalition of environmental groups, including the Gas Free NY alliance and Earthjustice, said in a statement.
The case, Mulhern Gas Co. v. Rodriguez, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York.
In May, New York became the first state in the country to ban natural gas appliances and infrastructure when the state Legislature approved a new state budget that included a prohibition on fossil fuel combustion in most new buildings starting in 2026.
The measure prohibits the installation of fossil fuel equipment in new buildings under seven stories by 2026 and in taller ones by 2029, effectively requiring all-electric heating and cooking.
There are exemptions for places such as hospitals, manufacturing facilities, and restaurants. Existing buildings are also exempt from the ban.
"Everybody who has a gas stove—enjoy it. Keep your gas stove," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in an appearance on FOX 5's "Good Day New York" on May 2, 2023. "But new buildings that are going up, they can go electric, they can do heat pumps."
At the time, Republican leaders in the state Senate opposed the measure, arguing that it would drive up utility bills.
"A first-in-the-nation, unconstitutional ban on natural gas hookups in new construction will drive up utility bills and increase housing costs," New York state Senate Republican leader Rob Ortt said in a statement earlier this year.
Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island and a former candidate for governor, criticized the Hochul administration’s priorities concerning the gas stove ban.
"New Yorkers are struggling to heat their homes and put gas in their cars," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Instead of approving new pipeline applications and reversing the state’s ban on the safe extraction of natural gas, Kathy Hochul and her allies are tripling down on kicking this state off the cliff."
At the time, climate lobbyists pushed for the New York state gas stove ban to go into effect in 2025, with the final deal amounting to a compromise that pushed implementation back one year.
And now, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are asking the court to declare the ban invalid and block its enforcement.
Challenging the Ban
The industry groups that are suing to block the prohibition are doing so on the legal premise that the ban is preempted by a federal law that regulates energy use, called the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA).
“EPCA reflects Congress’s decision that the nation’s energy policy cannot be dictated by state and local governments,” their complaint states. “Such a patchwork approach would be the antithesis of a national energy policy.”
Earlier this year, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California unanimously struck down a similar ban on gas infrastructure in Berkeley, California, holding that the prohibition fell afoul of the EPCA and was therefore illegal.
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The green energy Net Zero plan will require a command economy
Imagine the USA in 2050 has a net-zero emissions economy, as President Joe Biden has pledged that it will (the UK is also committed to this).
Three very large, interrelated, and multidisciplinary engineering projects will need to have been completed.
Transport will have been electrified. Industrial and domestic heat will have been electrified. The electricity sector – generation, transmission and distribution – will have been greatly expanded in order to cope with the first two projects, and will have ceased to use fossil fuels.
I have had a long career in industrial and academic engineering, and recently retired as Professor of Technology in electrical engineering at Cambridge University. I’ve spent some time looking into the feasibility of these ideas, and these are the facts.
At the moment the USA uses on average 7,768 trillion British Thermal Units of energy every month, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuel either directly for heat or transport, or indirectly to generate electricity.
Because an internal combustion engine converts the energy stored in its fuel into transport motion with an efficiency of about 30 per cent, while electric motors are more than 90 per cent efficient at using energy stored in a battery, we will need to increase the US electricity supply by about 25 per cent to maintain transport in the USA at today’s level.
Let’s assume that replacing today’s fossil-powered vehicles and trains with electric ones will cost no more than we would have spent replacing them anyway: it’s not really true but the difference is small compared to the rest of this. I should note however that a small part of today’s transport energy is used for aviation and shipping, which are much harder to electrify than ground transport, but we’ll ignore that for now.
Next we need to electrify all the heat. If this heat was provided by ordinary electric heaters, we would need an extra electrical sector equal to the size of today’s. But if we mostly use air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and assume a coefficient of performance of 3:1 – optimistic, but not wildly unreasonable – then we only need new grid capacity equivalent to 35 per cent of the size of the present grid for the heat task.
So far, the grid in 2050 will need to be more than 60 per cent bigger than its present size. We also need to work on the buildings. US building stock is made up of nearly 150 million housing units, commercial and industrial buildings, with an estimated floor space of 367 billion square feet. Some of this is well insulated, much of it is not. All of it would need to be, for our heat pumps to work at the efficiencies we need them to. Based on a UK pilot retrofit programme the national scale cost for this is $1 trillion per 15 million population. The figure in the USA could therefore be about $20 trillion. It might be as high as $35 trillion.
We should note here that as with transport, some specialist types of heating cannot at the moment be done electrically, for instance in primary steel production. These will involve extra costs if net zero is to be reached, but we’ll ignore that for now, even though we’re going to need an awful lot of steel.
Now let’s get the power grid decarbonised and make it 60 per cent bigger and more powerful. Taken together, the US electrical grid has been called the largest machine in the world: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution ones. We will need to add a further 120,000 miles of transmission line. This will cost on the order of $0.6 trillion, based on US cost data.
The 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines will have to be upgraded to carry much higher currents. Most houses in the USA have a main circuit-breaker panel that allows between 100 and 200 amps (A) current into the house, although some new ones are rated at 300A. The 100A standard was set nearly a century ago, when the electric kettle was the largest single appliance.
In a modern all-electric home, some of the new appliances draw rather higher currents: ground-source heat pumps may draw 85A on start-up, radiant hobs when starting up draw 37A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 46A, and even slow ones may draw 17A, while electric showers draw 46A. The local wiring in streets and local transformers were all sized to the 100-A limit. Most homes will need an upgraded circuit breaker panel and at least some rewiring, and much local wiring and many local substations will need upsizing. The UK costs have been estimated in detail at £1 trillion, which would scale to the order of $6 trillion on a per-capita basis.
As 60 per cent of the current electrical generation is fossil fuelled, we need to close all the fossil stations down and increase the remaining, non-fossil generation capacity four times over. There isn’t much scope for new hydropower, and so far carbon capture doesn’t exist outside fossil fuel production. Using a mixture of wind (onshore $1600/kW, offshore $6500/kW), solar ($1000/kW at the utility level) and nuclear ($6000/kW), the capital cost of this task alone is around $5 trillion, and we have not dealt with the enormous problem of wind and solar being intermittent.
So far we’re up to $32 trillion as the cost of providing the insulated buildings and the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in a net-zero world. Although not all borne by households, this figure is of the order of $260,000 per US household.
Now let’s think about intermittency. Sometimes there is no wind and no sunshine, and our largely renewables-driven grid will have no power. Current hydropower storage would run a net-zero grid in the USA for a few hours; current battery capacity could do so for a few minutes. Net-zero advocates often suggest simply building huge amounts of battery storage, but the costs of this are colossal: 80 times as much as the power plants, hundreds of trillions of dollars. And indeed this is simply fantasy as the necessary minerals are not available in anything like the required amounts. If prices climbed, more reserves would become economic – but the prices are already impossibly high.
Straight away, we can see that a net-zero grid with a large proportion of renewables simply cannot be built. But for now let’s just ignore the storage problem and look at some more numbers.
The UK engineering firm Atkins estimates that a $1-billion project in the electrical sector over 30 years needs 24 or more professional, graduate engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople for the whole period. Scaling up these figures for the $12 trillion of electricity sector projects just described, we will need 300,000 professional electrical engineers and 1.2 million skilled tradespeople, full time, for the 30 years to 2050 on just this part of the net-zero project. Based on the budget, we might expect the buildings retrofit sector to need a similar workforce of roughly three million people. This is a combined workforce roughly the size of the entire existing construction sector.
Now let’s think about materials. A 600-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) needs 300 tonnes of high-performance steels. We would need 360 5-MW wind turbines, each running at an optimistic average 33 per cent efficiency (and a major energy storage facility alongside which we are just ignoring as it would be impossibly expensive) to achieve the same continuous 600-MW supply. In fact, since the life of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGT turbines, we would actually need more than 720 of them.
The mass of the nacelle (the turbine at the top of the tower) for a 5-MW wind turbine is comparable to that of a CCGT. Furthermore, the mass of concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the mass of concrete for the foundations of each individual onshore wind turbine, and much smaller than the concrete and ballast for each offshore one. We are going to need enormous amounts of high-energy materials such as steel and concrete: something like a thousand times as much as we need to build CCGT or nuclear powerplants, and renewed more frequently. This vast requirement is probably going to affect prices, both of materials and energy – and not in a good way – but for now we’ll just assume costs remain at something like current levels.
So we can see that the infrastructure parts of the net-zero project which are theoretically possible would cost comfortably in excess of $35 trillion and would require a dedicated and highly skilled workforce comparable to that of the construction sector as well as enormous amounts of materials. Net zero would also require several things which today are completely impossible: scalable non-fossil energy storage, very high temperature electrical industrial processes, serious electrical aviation and shipping. There would also be the matter of decarbonising agriculture. These things, if they can even be achieved, would multiply the cost at least several times over, to more than $100 trillion.
So the real cost of net-zero, or more likely of trying and failing to achieve it, would be similar to – or even more than – total projected US government spending out to 2050. There is no likelihood of that amount of money being diverted from other purposes under anything resembling normal market economics and standards of living.
The idea that net zero can be achieved on the current timelines by any means short of a command economy combined with a drastic decline in standards of living – and several unlikely technological miracles – is a blatant falsehood. The silence of the National Academies and the professional science and engineering bodies about these big picture engineering realities is despicable.
People need to know the realities of net zero.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/11/green-energy-net-zero-biden-command-economy-impossible/
***************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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