Even Democrats don’t want to hear about climate change. The words were barely mentioned at the convention, and every transcript I examined omitted the once obligatory Biden modifier “existential.”
The reason isn’t a mystery. Joe Biden’s policies are having not the slightest effect on climate change and yet somebody will still have to pay Ford’s $130,000 in losses per electric vehicle in the first quarter. This sum, a calculation shows, is equal to $64.80 per gallon of gasoline saved over four years of average driving. And yes, this amounts to a ludicrously costly subsidy to somebody else to use the gasoline that EV drivers are paid to forgo.
Voilà, the flaw in the Biden strategy from the get-go, which completely defeats the goal of reducing emissions.
Regular readers may feel vindicated by a new study this week in the prestigious journal Science. It examines 1,500 “climate” policies adopted around the world and finds only 63—or 4%—produced any emissions reductions. Even so, press accounts strained to muddy the study’s simple lesson so let’s spell it out: Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing “green energy” doesn’t.
In fact, this should be old hat. One of the most cited papers in climate economics is 2012’s “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” by the University of Oregon’s Richard York. His answer: not “when net effects are considered.”
Mr. York and a colleague returned with a 2019 empirical paper showing that while “renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced.”
The result can’t really surprise the Obama-Biden Democrats, who sponsored a 2012 National Research Council study of their own, led by a future Nobel Prize winner no less. For similar reasons, the author didn’t mince words, concluding that green subsidies were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”
Yet this poor strategy Mr. Biden would later quadruple down on with upward of $1 trillion in taxpayer and energy consumer money.
I won’t rehearse the official lying that went into selling this folly, especially in the form of Mr. Biden’s laughably named Inflation Reduction Act. But nothing in presidential memory resembles Mr. Biden’s record of exceptionally unwise choices in office.
You know the litany: the second Covid spendathon that caused 9% inflation, the border collapse, the Afghanistan withdrawal, his attempt to appease Vladimir Putin after lying about a Russian connection to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Mr. Biden’s green-energy strategy was wrongheaded by every bit of economic advice, with nothing to show now except billions added to the deficit and a budding disaster from forcing Detroit to build EVs the public doesn’t want.
So let us welcome the new Science magazine study. “Backfire” was a term already turning up in the economics literature for policies that claim to reduce emissions but actually increase them.
Green-energy subsidies, in the first instance, subsidize extra fossil-fuel consumption to produce battery minerals, wind turbines and solar panels. U.S. policies particularly incentivize oversize SUVs whose net emissions are greater than any gasoline-fueled miles they could possibly displace.
When Washington spends hundreds of billions to lure some drivers to use EVs, guess what? It ends up making gasoline cheaper and more available for other consumers around the world to use.
The 2023 data have arrived. Fossil-fuel use, emissions and green energy all have grown right alongside each other, as economics predicted. Global emissions finally broke the 40 billion gigaton threshold, having doubled since 1984.
A few years ago the United Nations climate panel dropped its once-standard emissions scenario RCP 8.5 as unduly pessimistic. It may have to be revived. RCP 8.5 was a model of emissions under systematically bad global economic policies, such as Mr. Biden’s green-energy trade wars and industrial pork barrel, that inhibit the global economy’s quest for energy efficiency.
Obama handler David Axelrod ventured on CNN this week that the Democratic convention had turned out to be a “values-laden” affair, short on “policy specifics.”
This understates how thoroughly the convention left voters having to guess how Kamala Harris will act on a myriad of issues. Their only guide is apparently that she doesn’t kick puppies and Donald Trump does.
Every scintilla suggests Ms. Harris nevertheless would bring better natural judgment than Mr. Biden. But because she, like America, has been swathed in the New York Times’s unanalytical, uncritical cheerleading, she will still likely be dumbfounded to learn the truth about Biden climate policies.
Perhaps we should say “if” she chooses to hear the truth. Because there’s a good chance she will keep throwing your money and mine on the pyre to avoid admitting a mistake.
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LA Times: ‘To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism’
By Rosanna Xia - La Times Staff Writer: How do you cope? I feel the sorrow, the quiet plea for guidance every time someone asks me this question. As an environmental reporter dedicated to helping people make sense of climate change, I know I should have answers. But the truth is, it took me until now to face my own grief. ...With each new heat record shattered, and each new report declaring a code red for humanity, I can’t help but feel like we’re just counting down the days to our own extinction. ...
How can they feel hopeful about the future, they asked, when, on top of everything already stacked against them, they also have to worry about wildfires, extreme heat and air pollution getting out of control?
‘Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question’ asks: With American society feeling more socially and politically polarized than ever, is it right to bring another person into the world?
When talking about climate anxiety, it’s important to differentiate whether you’re assessing these emotions as a mental health condition, or as a cultural phenomenon. Let’s start with mental health: Polls show climate anxiety is on the rise and that people all around the world are losing sleep over climate change. Organizations like the Climate-Aware Therapist Directory and the American Psychiatric Assn. have put together an increasing number of guides and resources to help more people understand how climate change has affected our emotional well-being.
But you can’t treat climate anxiety like other forms of anxiety, and here’s where the cultural politics come in: The only way to make climate anxiety go away is to make climate change go away, and given the fraught and deeply systemic underpinnings of climate change, we must also consider this context when it comes to our climate emotions.
“Climate anxiety can’t be limited to just a clinical setting — we have to take it out of the therapy room and look at it through a lens of privilege, and power, and the economic, historical and social structures that are at the root of the problem,” said Sarah Jaquette Ray, whose book “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety” is a call to arms to think more expansively about our despair. “Treating a person’s climate anxiety without challenging these systems only addresses the symptoms, not the causes... and if white or more privileged emotions get the most airtime, and if we don’t see how climate is intersecting with all these other problems, that can result in a greater silencing of the people most impacted.”
The trick to fixing climate anxiety is to fix individualism, she said. Start small, tap into what you’re already good at, join something bigger than yourself. ... And by fixing individualism, as many young activists like Patel have already figured out, we just might have a better shot at fixing climate change.
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Talking points on Kamala Harris's fracking reversal
Kamala Harris is still for banning fracking—as is everyone who advocates the net-zero agenda
Myth: Kamala Harris used to be for banning fracking, but now she supports fracking.
Truth: Kamala Harris is still for banning fracking—because she is still for the net-zero agenda that requires banning fracking along with all other fossil fuel activities.
Kamala Harris, who in 2019 said, “There is no question I am in favor of banning fracking,” now tells voters in fracking-dependent states like Pennsylvania that she is no longer wants to ban fracking.
They shouldn’t believe her, since Harris’s net-zero agenda requires banning fracking.1
To know what to make of Harris’s reversal on a fracking ban, we need to first recognize that banning fracking would have been one of the most harmful policies in US history. It would have destroyed 60% of our oil production and 75% of our natural gas production.2
Fracking is very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years. By extracting cheap, abundant oil and natural gas from once useless rock, it has made energy far cheaper than it would otherwise be.
Fracking and agriculture: The availability of food is highly determined by the cost of oil, which powers crucial machinery, and gas, which is the basis of the fertilizer that allows us to feed 8 billion people. Thanks to fracking, the world is far better fed than it would otherwise be.
Given how life-giving fracking is to humanity and how essential it is to the prosperity and security of the US, any politician who has ever suggested banning fracking should be considered an energy menace until and unless they issue a deeply reflective apology.
Harris and others who have advocated banning fracking should apologize along the following lines: “I called for banning something crucial because I listened only to exaggerated claims about its negatives and ignored its huge benefits. I am deeply sorry, and pledge to do better.”
Someone who comes to understand why it’s wrong to ban fracking—because the benefits you would destroy are far greater than the harms you would avoid—should also understand that the same problem exists with the broader anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda.
Harris has not apologized whatsoever for her support of a murderous fracking ban.
And far from questioning the anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda, she has remained 100% committed to it.
Which means she’s an enemy of not just fracking but all fossil fuel use.
The guiding energy goal of Biden/Harris is “net zero by 2050”—rapidly banning activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere.
Since there’s no scalable way to capture CO2, burning fossil fuels necessarily means more CO2.
“Net zero” = “ban most fossil fuel use”—including fracking.3
Given that “net zero by 2050” requires banning virtually all fossil fuel activity, the whole conversation about whether Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking is absurd.
You can’t be for fracking and for net-zero anymore than you can be for penicillin and for banning all antibiotics.
For “net zero by 2050” advocates there’s no question of if they want to ban particular fossil fuel activities such as fracking in the next 25 years, just when and in what order.
If Harris doesn’t try to ban fracking soon she’ll just try to ban other vital fossil fuel activities.
The Biden-Harris administration has already shown us that they will try to do everything they can to ban fossil fuels in pursuit of net-zero—and that they will only be limited by pro-fossil-fuel political opponents’ opposition and the resistance of voters.
Both Biden and Harris made it clear when campaigning that their guiding energy goal was “net zero by 2050” and that meant rapidly banning fossil fuels.
Biden: “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel.” Harris’s cosponsored Green New Deal called for banning fossil fuels.4
When they entered office, Biden and Harris continued to make “net zero by 2050” their guiding goal by rejoining the Paris Agreement that committed us to it and by announcing a “whole of government” focus on “climate”—code for: rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/talking-points-on-kamala-harriss
****************************************Wanted: a leader to change the world
The political leader who unmasks and debunks the false premise on which climate alarm is built will change the world. I say this apropos the global headlong rush into economic disaster favoured by fanatical climate alarmists like UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘boiling earth’ Guterres, King (and climate change book author) Charles III, Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris ‘renewables are cheap’ Bowen … and the Teals.
To debunk the hysterical and unscientifically dishonest climate alarmism is not that hard to do, given the crowd of credible climate scientists not bound by the ruling orthodoxy who are more than happy to provide good evidence that there is no climate emergency; fossil fuels do not drive global warming; carbon dioxide is a clean trace element in our atmosphere essential to life on this planet; and that the claim of a consensus (‘the science is in’) is false – and blatantly anti-scientific.
Don’t listen to me, check the evidence as provided by hundreds of scientists. But the starting point from a policy point of view is that the climate change debate has long ago shed its skin of climate science and revealed the raw political agenda underneath: economic revolution, empowering the new elites, such as the economic carpetbaggers on the renewables gravy train.
Am I seriously suggesting that debunking climate alarmism would change the world? I am. Just as climate change hysteria has changed the world, calming the alarmism would, too. Think of the plethora of panicky policies enacted to chase emission reductions. Think of the reckless manufacture and installation of wind turbines and solar panels across the land – around the world. That’s just the top-line policies … most readers (especially in the regions) would be aware of many others.
I recognise that any political leader embarking on such a mission would require powerful arguments – and powerful nerves – to face down a well-embedded climate of orthodox catastrophism. And that’s just within their own party.
But everything is at stake. From the mental health of school children to the economies of the Western world.
So let me kick start the thinking with some observations from scientists working in the subject field:
Writing in June 2022 on clintel.org, petrophysicist Andy May reported:
‘Recently, the Biden administration has tried to use the powers of the SEC to force companies to disclose information on their supposed climate-related business risks through a proposed SEC rule. Two esteemed members of the CO2 Coalition, Princeton Professor, emeritus, William Happer and MIT Professor, emeritus, Richard Lindzen have reviewed the proposed rule and filed a critical comment on the rule with the SEC. In addition, they have filed an amicus curiae court brief with the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stating that they do not believe there is a climate-related risk related to burning fossil fuels, and the resulting CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.’
Happer and Lindzen also make the observations:
Elites are always searching for ways to advertise their virtue and assert the authority they believe they are entitled to.
They view science as source of authority rather than a process, and they try to appropriate science, suitably and incorrectly simplified, as the basis for their movement.
Movements need goals, and these goals are generally embedded in legislation.
The effect of legislation long outlasts the alleged science. The Immigration Reduction Act of 1924 remained until 1964.
As long as scientists are rewarded for doing so, they are unlikely to oppose the exploitation of science.
Politicians (perhaps a coalition of world-changers?) willing to tackle this consequential issue must be good scouts: be prepared. And brave.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/wanted-a-leader-to-change-the-world/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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