EVERYTHING is caused by global warming
The article below says that increases in dangerous air turbulence encountered by aircraft are caused by global warming. It supports that claim by quoting a "study" on the subject. I have been unable to find the original study but below is a summary of it:
Research published last year by meteorologists from the University of Reading found that our skies are around 55 per cent more turbulent than they were 40 years ago. Scientists found that in a typical spot in the North Atlantic –one of the world's busiest routes – the total annual duration of clear-air turbulence rose from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020. Moderate turbulence in the same region is also up by a staggering 37 per cent.So how was turbulence measured? Since it is invisible, it was presumably measured simply by counting incidents reported by aircraft experiencing it. But there would be an increasing number of aircraft flights over the 40 year period between 1979 and 2020. So even if the frequency of turbulence was unchanged we would still see more reports of it. So the "expectation" of Prof Williams is unsupported. And even if his expectation were soundly based, he has no data to link it to global warming. Aren't "expectations" wonderful climate data?
Paul Williams, a co-author of the study, expects a 181 per cent increase in clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic by 2050-2080, as rising global temperatures increase the velocity and unpredictability of windshears.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13443767/JULIAN-BRAY-turbulence-worse-increasing.html
A former pilot and aircraft accident investigator has suggested climate change may have been responsible for the horror plane plunge that left one passenger dead and injured dozens more.
Almost 60 Australians were on-board flight SQ321 from London to Singapore on Tuesday when the Boeing 777-300ER aircraft suddenly plunged more than 6,000 feet in just five minutes, hurling passengers and crew into the ceiling.
Geoffrey Kitchen, a 73-year-old musical theatre director from Gloucestershire, UK, died of a suspected heart attack, while eight Australians were later hospitalised from injuries sustained in the chaos.
The disaster, which was caused by a pocket of unexpected turbulence 11 hours into the journey, forced the plane to make an emergency landing at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Shocking pictures taken inside the plane captured a scene of utter carnage including air stewards with blood smeared across their faces, oxygen masks dangling from the damaged ceiling and rubbish strewn in every aisle.
Tim Atkinson, an aviation consultant and a former aircraft accident investigator, said the plane was one of the 'largest and I daresay the most solid airframes flying around the world'.
'It's regarded as an exceptionally well-built machine in the piloting and aviation fraternity and for turbulence to have had this effect on a triple-seven it must have been really quite severe,' he told Sky News.
Mr Atkinson said that the area the plane was flying over, which is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, is 'renowned among pilots, and I dare say passengers, for turbulence'.
'Despite abundant caution occasionally, there's turbulence ahead which can't be identified, and the unfortunate result of an encounter is injury and, very rarely, fatality,' he said.
Mr Atkinson urged all passengers to keep their seatbelt fastened whenever they are seated.
He also suggested a disturbing theory for the disaster.
'We are seeing as climate change is occurring that turbulence is becoming more common and more severe and that's something that the aviation industry is trying to address at the moment,' Mr Atkinson told the BBC.
A global study published last year by Reading University in the UK found that climate change is increasing turbulence during flights – and it predicted that the trend is set to worsen.
It found that in a typical spot in the North Atlantic - one of the world's busiest routes - the total annual duration of severe turbulence increased by 55 per cent from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020.
'My message from this is we need to do something otherwise flights will become more turbulent in future (as climate change drives more turbulence),' said Professor Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist who co-authored the study.
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Wind Subsidies Are Rising… but wind power production isn’t rising with them
Administration (EIA) shows a decrease in wind power production in 2023. Despite record highs in installed wind capacity and continually rising subsidies production is falling.
Thanks to these subsidies, including the longstanding Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Investment Tax Credit (ITC), and the extensions that these credits received in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), subsidies for wind power have seen a dramatic increase over the last decade. The IRA extended these credits through 2025, and replaces them with the new, but similar, Clean Energy PTC and Clean Energy ITC through 2032. It also added provisions to provide even larger subsidies for projects that meet “Environmental Justice” requirements. All of this together will maintain, and increase, both the scope of subsidies for wind, and the impact that those subsidies have on the overall market for electricity.
Will this money do any good for the power grid? Will added investment in renewable sources, particularly wind, lead to any increase in the amount of wind power generated? And will that capacity increase or decrease the resiliency of the grid?
The answer to all of the preceding questions is an emphatic “no” and recent reality bears this out.
The highest installed wind capacity on record was last year, with nearly 150 gigawatts of installed wind capacity in the US.
Even with this record capacity last year, there was also a decline in power generated from wind for the first time. There was 2.1 percent less wind power generated in 2023 than in 2022. This was in part due to slower wind speeds that year, an inherent flaw of wind power. The intermittency of the source also means that sometimes wind power is unavailable when demand is high, but available when it is not, which can also result in less wind power being used.
These aren’t problems that subsidy dollars can solve, they’re inherent to the technology. Despite this, lawmakers have continually tried throwing money at the problem. From 2016 to 2022, the federal government spent approximately $18.7 billion on subsidies for wind power alone. This is a massive amount of money. It’s even more considerable given that wind’s intermittency heavily limits its benefit to reliability.
During that period, wind subsidies were much higher than the subsidies for any of the conventional power sources: natural gas, coal, and nuclear. Specifically, the wind subsidies were about 2.5 times greater than both coal subsidies and refined coal subsidies, and greater than both coal and refined coal subsidies combined. The wind subsidies were also about double the subsidies for natural gas and petroleum liquids and about 6.5 times greater than nuclear subsidies.
Renewables received 46 percent of overall power subsidies, despite constituting a very small portion of overall power generation.
This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s total subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the disparity would be even more extreme given how much more output conventional sources have. To be clear, policymakers shouldn’t be increasing the subsidies for reliable sources to account for this disparity. The way to fix power markets is to subsidize everything less (ideally not at all). The solution to grid reliability problems is certainly not to subsidize the least reliable sources the most.
Decreasing wind generation makes wind’s power production limitations more obvious. It also emphasizes what many reliability advocates have been saying for years: government meddling in electricity markets in favor of unreliable sources will have consequences for reliability as money is funneled away from what works and toward what does not.
As a general matter, lawmakers should stop subsidizing energy sources. To protect reliability, lawmakers should look to repeal the IRA extensions of wind and solar tax credits as a first step toward repairing the damage that these subsidies have done to electricity markets.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/05/21/wind-subsidies-rising/?omhide=true
*********************************************Hydrogen madness in New Mexico
Over the past month, in public meetings stretching from the Navajo Nation to Albuquerque, public officials and company representatives unveiled a picture of a new hydrogen energy industry being built in the northwest corner of New Mexico. The presentations reveal hydrogen production, transportation, power generation and carbon sequestration projects arcing across the Navajo Nation to Farmington and down to the I-40 corridor between Gallup and Albuquerque. Most of the projects are underway, and it’s clear they’ll rely on fossil fuels.
Tallgrass Energy sits at the center of all this activity and has the backing of the state’s biggest political player, New Mexico’s governor. The Denver-based company operates more than 7,000 miles of natural gas pipelines stretching from Oregon to Ohio, and it’s going all-in on creating the necessary pieces of a new economic base in New Mexico’s second-largest fossil fuel producing region. The region’s natural gas holds the key to many of the projects
“Hydrogen is huge!” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham proclaimed while speaking at an event in Farmington in April. What came next is what many in the region fear.
“Hydrogen uses the natural gas resources here we don’t know what to do with,” she said.
Actually, plenty of people know what to do with natural gas. The issue is that fewer and fewer people want to use it, even as more and more of it is being produced. Historically, natural gas has been used most significantly for electrical grid power generation in the U.S., but its use in that arena is declining as renewable energy prices drop in the face of government climate policies and ever-cheaper solar technology.
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than it provides when converted to useful energy.
Meanwhile, natural gas prices have tanked due to a production glut caused by ever-increasing oil production using hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in places like the Permian Basin, shared between New Mexico and Texas. Producers want the oil, which brings a market price well above the cost of its production. But, pulled from the well, that fracked oil comes commingled with the less desired natural gas. Over the past month, natural gas prices dipped below zero at a main pipeline transit hub in Texas due to the glut. Some companies are storing gas underground, awaiting better days and prices.
Enter hydrogen. The most plentiful element in the universe is a perfectly clean fuel when used to make electricity in a fuel cell. It’s generally cleaner than natural gas when burned to make heat, though the process produces nitrogen oxides that the EPA says damage the human respiratory system and contribute to acid rain.
The crux lies in how you make your hydrogen, which rarely exists on its own on earth. The cleanest, most energy-intensive way breaks water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable energy. The common way breaks off hydrogen atoms from the methane in natural gas. Either way, it takes more energy to make hydrogen than it provides when converted to useful energy. When made with natural gas, the process also produces a lot of climate-damaging carbon dioxide. That defeats hydrogen’s clean bonafides unless the carbon dioxide is captured and buried underground, a process that uses even more energy.
Furthermore, the natural gas production and transportation process often leaks, sometimes a lot. That gas is mostly methane, which is 80 times more capable of warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it’s released.
The federal government incentivized so-called low-carbon hydrogen production from natural gas with carbon sequestration in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Many worry that this will lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions in light of New Mexico’s rocky track record of policing its oil and gas producers. All of this means a fuel promoted to fight climate change could actually exacerbate it, and cost a lot, too.
“How companies choose to produce that hydrogen will fundamentally be a business decision they must make,” said Michael Coleman, director of communications to Gov. Lujan Grisham. “Our greatest opportunity as a state is producing hydrogen from a range of feedstocks.”
Gov. Lujan Grisham has stumped for hydrogen for years, with little support from the state’s Legislature or environmental groups. She also sought a multibillion-dollar grant from the federal government to create a multi-state hydrogen ecosystem centered in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, but the feds snubbed it last October. Hydrogen investments face a bumpy road in other states as well.
Nonetheless, Lujan Grisham forges on — she went to the Netherlands last week to drum up more hydrogen investments. Meanwhile, testing and planning chug along, with Tallgrass linking many of the far-flung pieces together. “The governor is looking to attract all kinds of hydrogen businesses to New Mexico,” Coleman said. “Tallgrass’ proposal draws all of the attention because of its scale but is hardly the only initiative under way.”
“One of the more notable misconceptions that we’ve struggled to overcome is the view that we are focused on a singular point-to-point hydrogen project,” said Steven Davidson, vice president of government and public affairs for Tallgrass Energy. He’s referring to a hydrogen pipeline being developed by GreenView, a Tallgrass subsidiary. “We are working to create a clean energy ecosystem in coordination with many other parties,” he said.
One of those parties is the Four Corners Clean Energy Alliance, an advocacy group promoting hydrogen development and associated technologies in the region on behalf of GreenView and Tallgrass. One of the group’s board members is an executive at Tallgrass. Both the group’s interim director and director of communications also work for the Consumer Energy Alliance, an industry trade group sponsored in part by a who’s-who of fossil fuel energy producers.
The Tallgrass ecosystem includes a carbon capture and sequestration project with New Mexico Tech. The university has been studying the geology of the San Juan Basin since 2020 with the goal of getting three sequestration wells operational in a few years. The project is in the middle of its federal permitting process and could be approved sometime next year.
It also includes the Escalante coal-fired power plant retrofitted to burn hydrogen, along I-40 between Albuquerque and Gallup and the hydrogen pipeline linking Farmington to central Arizona and crossing the Navajo Nation, a controversial project still in the planning stages.
It’s expected to include a hydrogen production facility or two in or near Farmington, with exact locations to be determined.
And there’s more. At a San Juan County Commission meeting in April, the lead researcher on the carbon sequestration project pointed out that if the Escalante power plant is to reach its carbon-free objective, Tallgrass has to build another pipeline, this one for carbon dioxide, running from the Escalante power plant to the future carbon sequestration wells, roughly 100 miles to the north and crossing the eastern reaches of the Navajo Nation.
Meanwhile, the hydrogen pipeline project has already drawn fire from Navajo opposed to further energy projects on the Nation. The tribe has a 100-year history of outside companies coming in, making fortunes from Native resources and leaving environmental messes behind.
“All the projects that have ever been on Navajo [Nation] made those companies a lot of money,” said Jessica Keetso, who is Diné and an organizer with Tó Nizhóní Ání or Sacred Water Speaks, a Navajo water rights and environmental protection group. Historically, she said, they don’t clean up after themselves. “They get away with not doing reclamation, for everything from oil and gas, uranium to coal,” she said.
“Will this really kickstart our economy, our Navajo Nation economy? I think that’s questionable. If 50 years of coal mining couldn’t do that, hydrogen is not going to do that.”
~ Jessica Keetso, organizer, Tó Nizhóní Ání
Many are also unhappy with how Tallgrass has gone about drumming up support from the tribe’s widely spaced, often-impoverished population.
At a meeting of the Navajo Nation Resources and Development Committee in Albuquerque in late April to discuss the hydrogen pipeline project, committee member Rickie Nez told Tallgrass representatives, “No more gift cards! No more gift cards! It makes you look like you’re bribing someone.”
GreenView representatives had been giving out gift cards to tribal members who attended chapter house meetings where the pipeline was discussed. (Chapter houses are the most local form of government on the Navajo Nation.) At some meetings, tribal members also voted on resolutions to allow the pipeline to cross their chapters. Davidson said the company came up with the idea “in consultation with respected cultural advisors from the Navajo Nation … to lessen the burden to the individual to encourage them to participate.” He said that the cards were for $25 to $50. He also heard that the cards “met with some concern about optics. We completely understand that point.”
In addition, at the Resources and Development Committee meeting, Adam Schiche, whose online profile says he is the vice president for international business development at Tallgrass, said that GreenView representatives met with and paid individual grazing permit holders $500 for the possibility of working on land where livestock grazes. Davidson later said, “We have no qualms” in offering upfront payments, treating Navajo permit holders “exactly like landowners off the Nation.” He said further money would be given if the project goes forward.
“Money talks. Money is persuading people, which is a very sad thing to see,” said Keetso. “The tactics are actually paying off for them because two months ago they didn’t have any resolutions.”
For roughly two years, representatives from both Tó Nizhóní Ání and GreenView have made their cases for or against the pipeline and asked chapters to consider resolutions supporting or opposing it all along the proposed pipeline route. At the April Resources and Development Committee hearing, Schiche said that Tallgrass representatives had gathered resolutions in favor of the pipeline from five chapters. Tó Nizhóní Ání has gathered 15 against.
Tallgrass’ main business is natural gas, and while the focus on hydrogen is touted as part of a climate change solution, it’s clearly connected to those fossil fuel operations. “We believe every practical option to decarbonize should be advanced — including the decarbonization of natural gas to make … hydrogen,” Davidson said. He sees hydrogen keeping the lights on, firing power plants when the sun goes down and the winds calm. “Hydrogen is a proven way to convert and store that clean electricity for when it’s needed,” he said. That’s the idea that ties natural gas to carbon sequestration, to the Escalante hydrogen-fired power plant 100 miles west of Albuquerque and to a 200-mile pipeline across the Navajo Nation to central Arizona.
Powering the electric grid with expensive hydrogen isn’t universally popular. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit that helps businesses and governments transition away from fossil fuels, promotes a common view for hydrogen’s best uses. “Fertilizer, oil refining and petrochemicals, steel manufacturing, and long-distance heavy-duty transport are no-regrets applications of hydrogen today,” they write. Hydrogen power plants aren’t what’s needed now.
In the end, New Mexico’s discussion about hydrogen is about money. At the Resource and Development Committee meeting, Schiche told the group that $400,000 a year would be split among chapter houses along the pipeline route. In addition, the Nation could choose either a percentage stake in the pipeline company or annual payment for gas moving through the line.
“Will this really kickstart our economy, our Navajo Nation economy?” Keetso said later. “I think that’s questionable. If 50 years of coal mining couldn’t do that, hydrogen is not going to do that.”
Long-term jobs are a perennial hope for any projects on the Nation, where unemployment runs high. Schiche said that there would be a lot of construction work while building the project, but “the pipeline itself doesn’t generate a lot of jobs.” He said those would be at two hydrogen production sites somewhere around Farmington — which is not on the reservation.
Keetso calls on bigger groups to fight alongside Tó Nizhóní Ání against the hydrogen projects. She said, “I just wish big greens would get off the fence and say, ‘Hey, this hydrogen may be the solution for some things. But the way that this company is doing it is wrong.’”
https://capitalandmain.com/like-it-or-not-a-hydrogen-ecosystem-is-coming-to-new-mexico
************************************************Comedy environmentalist Jim Dale and Dale Vince have both suggested that climate ‘denial’ should be a criminal offence
It gets them clicks and attention on cable and mainstream news, and it plays into a wider push by green billionaire-funded lawfare outfits using the courts to enforce Net Zero industrial shutdown. But it begs the question: what are the climate ‘deniers’ actually denying?
Dale is a climate campaigner who points to bad weather as evidence that the climate is collapsing before our very eyes. But the evidence suggests no such thing. Data since 2000 show that there has been no increase in extreme weather, no increase in loss of life and no increase in economic costs.
The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) is a U.S. Government-supported tracker of mass disasters as well as health and economic impacts. It lists 26,000 disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day. Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a former Geology Professor, has compiled data from this source and they provide no evidence to support the claim that ‘extreme’ weather is on the rise.
Dr. Wielicki suggests that the recent decrease in perceived climate urgency and importance among the American public, especially young adults, as shown by the recent Monmouth University poll “may be influenced by an observable lack of escalation in the direct impacts of climate change”. Such data can lead to scepticism or reduced concern, he adds.
It seems that the lack of evidence drives the alarmists further and further away from scientific reality in their desperation to promote Net Zero.
Last week’s absurd survey of 380 “top scientists” by the Guardian found climate modeller Ruth Cerezo-Mota wailing that it was almost impossible not to feel “hopeless and broken” after all the flooding, fires and droughts of the last three years. Biologist Camille Parmesan was so fearful she almost gave up what she called climate science 15 years ago to become a nightclub singer.
Now she says all the scientists she works with are at the end of their rope “asking what the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is”. Engineering Professor Jonathan Cullen states the climate emergency is already here because just 1°C of heating has “supercharged the planet’s extreme weather”.
Millions of people have “very likely” died early as a result, he claimed. Lorraine Whitmarsh is an ‘environmental psychologist’ at the University of Bath, and worries about the future her children are inheriting since climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity.
The Guardian article was written by Damian Carrington, one of the green billionaire-funded lobby group Covering Climate Now’s three journalists of the year in 2023. This operation pumps out ready-to-publish climate catastrophe copy to media outlets worldwide.
Carrington polled over 800 lead authors or review editors of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2018. He received replies from 380 authors, but as with all IPCC (and Guardian) reports, the definition of ‘climate scientists’ is very broad. Carrington describes Professor Lisa Schipper as an “expert on climate vulnerability”.
Schipper notes that she is “particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity”. Ralph Sims of Massey University says extreme weather events will escalate and there will be environmental refugees by the millions. Sims’s first job in academia was as a lecturer in agricultural machinery.
Meanwhile, back to the science, and the problem – the giant elephant in the room no less – is that the IPCC gives almost no credence to talk of a climate crisis based on observable bad weather patterns in the past and looking forward to the end of this century.
The above table published in the latest IPCC assessment report reveals this clearly. It shows there is little or no evidence that the following have been, or will be by 2100, affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial flooding, landslides, droughts (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and maritime heatwaves.
Far from living in a time of climate collapse, we appear to be enjoying a benign spell in an interglacial period. A little extra carbon dioxide, rescuing the Earth from possibly dangerous denudation, and a gentle rise of 1°C in temperature from the Little Ice Age, has boosted plant growth around the world. Evidence continues to be produced showing substantial CO2 greening of the planet including desert areas. A recent paper Chen et al. 2024 found that CO2 greening had actually accelerated over the last two decades.
The people spinning the tale of climate collapse – some of them advocating jail time for dissenters – are hysterical, but deadly serious. Ask Gianluca Alimonti, an Italian Physics Professor, whose paper stating a climate emergency was not supported by the available data, was recently retracted by Springer Nature after a year-long campaign by activist scientists and journalists, including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian.
The Alimonti paper, which also included the work of two other physics professors, found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed “no clear positive trend of extreme events”.
Only a fool would consider arguing that climate contrarian scientists should be sent to jail, as Dale did with Andrew Doyle last Sunday on GB News’s Free Speech Nation. Alas, the transcript of Dale’s comments does little to clarify his argument – it’s just word salad gibberish for the most part. But his intention is clear.
Time for ‘deniers’, whatever they are supposed to be denying, to be marched off to jail. The sad thing is that he is not alone – Dale says it is “common sense”, which, as Doyle observed, is the refrain of every tyrant in history who’s wanted to jail his opponents.
https://principia-scientific.com/fanatics-call-for-climate-deniers-to-be-jailed/
****************************************************Beware of Climate Activists Cosplaying as ‘Conservatives’
As a general rule of thumb, if the only reason you would identify somebody as a conservative is because they repeatedly insist they are a conservative, they likely are not a conservative. Readers should keep this general rule in mind if they read self-proclaimed conservative climate activist Benji Backer’s new book: The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future.
Backer has created a niche for himself claiming conservative politicians can and must embrace climate activism as a way to hold true to conservative principles and win over young voters. His message runs along the line of, Hey, conservatives, I am one of you. You can trust me that climate activism is truly a conservative issue.
Most conservatives, however, would not recognize Backer’s words and actions as those of a conservative. Prior to writing his book, Backer:
proudly described himself as “Never Trump” and preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election;
slammed Trump’s restrictions on immigrants from terrorist-tied nations as anti-Muslim;
approvingly re-tweeted a statement that supported banning Trump from social media;
called for the reinstatement of FDR New Deal policies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps;
advocated government taking control of 30 percent of America’s land for environmental purposes;
claimed conservative Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) “encouraged” the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, even as Johnson took to social media encouraging people to disperse;
made vitriolic attacks on conservative leaders Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO);
called Donald Trump “despicable and indefensible;”
asserted policymakers who do not support mass COVID-19 vaccinations “has to be one of the lowest possible lows;”
criticized people who did not want to wear face masks as “stupid” and not protecting others “because they want to make a political statement.”
literally said “thank you” to Greta Thunberg for playing “a critical role in generating worldwide awareness around this issue of climate change.”
Are these the words and actions of a conservative? Are these the words and actions of a person conservatives should trust to guide them on policy issues?
While Backer goes out of his way to venomously slam conservatives Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Josh Hawley, he simultaneously elicits fawning praise from the political left. Van Jones, the far-left CNN pundit who served as Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, praises Backer’s book as “a critical blueprint for the future of climate action.”
It’s not a coincidence that leftist political pundits praise Backer’s book. Backer wastes no time heaping praise on former President Richard Nixon for creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and creating the framework for the nation’s most far-reaching and much abused “environmental protection” laws. He celebrates the mandatory and controversial Green Building Standards Code in California. He admits his American Conservation Coalition is not a conservative organization at all, but is a mix of liberals, independents, and conservatives. One suspects its membership is far more liberal and far less conservative than Backer advertises.
Backer derisively refers to people who disagree with him as “deniers.” He says Alex Epstein supports an “extreme” position for saying we should maximize the benefits of fossil fuels.
Backer praises the Clean Water Act for its brevity, which allows the EPA to interpret the Act any way it wants and become a runaway authoritarian entity.
Backer bemoans the “overconsumption of coffee” because coffee cultivation sometimes occurs on previously undeveloped land. He bemoans “fashion overproduction” and “surplus luxury.” These are not conservative action items, either.
Backer praises Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for giving “green hydrogen” subsidies that are not available to conventional energy. How are these special-interest subsidies either conservative or desirable?
Backer repeatedly advocates government-created “incentives” (i.e., taxing-and-spending to undermine and redirect market conditions). However, heavy taxation and heavy government financial intervention are not conservative policy principles. Backer can arguably claim his plan for government intervention through taxing and spending favoritism is not as terrible as some more draconian alternatives, but his government-intervention plan is still neither conservative nor desirable.
Backer provides a perfect illustration of his flawed logic and overarching worldview when he writes, “Without incentives, none of the energy sources we use today would have become as inexpensive, accessible, or clean as they are. Oil and gas became as ubiquitous as they did because federal, state, and local governments continually used incentives to generate competition among power companies to encourage better efficiency.”
No, oil and gas became ubiquitous because they are much more concentrated, abundant, dependable, and affordable energy sources than the whale oil and windmills they replaced. Backer’s logic is pretty much the same as President Barack Obama’s when he said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Claiming that the benevolent influence of government is the source of any business’ success is not a conservative worldview or conservative principle.
In its barest form, Benji Backer believes climate change is the single most important issue facing humanity today. He advocates heavy government intervention through tax-and-spend subsidies to direct people’s behavior rather than outright restrictions or mandates. However, most conservatives realize that climate change is not a significant threat and heavy government intervention, in whatever form it takes, is not a conservative policy prescription. It is no wonder that Backer finds himself agreeing with leftist policies on a wide variety of topics and singling out conservatives for particularly venomous attacks. Backer may tell people he is a conservative in order to sell them his climate activism, but the vast majority of conservatives – fortunately – see through this.
https://heartland.org/opinion/beware-of-climate-activists-cosplaying-as-conservatives/
***************************************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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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