Berkeley Scholar: Climate Change Is Officially Dead. But Blame Activists, Not Trump
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal Monday, Steven F. Hayward, senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, declared that climate change as a pre-eminent policy issue has officially "run its course." And if you're looking for someone to blame, he suggests, don't look at President Trump, look instead at left-wing activists who've let their social justice and "green utopian vision" sabotage viable solutions.
"All that remains" of the climate change political movement, writes Hayward, "is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers." Most national governments, he explains, have been steadily "backing away from forced-marched decarbonization." The arc of climate change as a policy priority, he declares, can officially be dated from 1988 to 2018.
But while the issue has run its course in the early years of Trump's presidency, he notes, Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement "merely ratified a trend long becoming evident." No, Trump isn't to blame for the demise of the issue; in the end, the self-defeating ideological agenda of social justice and climate activists have finally buried it.
"The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out," writes Hayward. And this collapse of the movement, he explains, was utterly "predictable."
Citing political scientist Anthony Downs' 1972 article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’" Hayward lays out the five stages of a political movement, with which climate change has tracked perfectly. It's now suffering the inglorious fifth stage:
Stage 1: Experts and activists call attention to a public problem.
Stage 2: The "alarmed media and political class discover the issue" and often stir up "euphoric enthusiasm ... as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation."
Stage 3: The "hinge," characterized by "a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed."
Stage 4: The "gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem."
Stage 5: A "prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest," which often involves "painful trade-offs" that activists simply aren't willing to make.
Climate change is clearly in this fifth and final stage, he explains, where activists are blocking viable solutions as a result of their ideology, including social justice activism and their "utopian" environmental vision:
A case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy, whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry.”
If scientists want to be angry with anyone, he writes, they should direct that anger at the Left for politicizing the issue and the international policy community for narrowing what it deems to be acceptable responses.
"Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers," he concludes. "Causes that live by politics, die by politics."
SOURCE
Recycling nonsense hits a rock in New England
Once labor costs are included, it is doubtful if any municipal recycling scheme has been profitable. Sending everything straight to the landfill would save a lot of money
Buried in the mountains of refuse at Casella’s recycling plant in Charlestown are tons of material that should have gone straight to the landfill — from tires and pots to lobster buoys and garden hoses — items that can gum up the machines and taint the byproducts ultimately sold as commodities.
The increasing amount of such non-recyclable waste entering processing plants has sparked a backlash in the countries that convert the material into useful products, most notably China, which used to process the vast majority of US recyclables before it cracked down on what materials it would accept this year.
The result is a backup at some recycling plants in Massachusetts and across the United States, driving up costs and disrupting the industry and local municipalities’ refuse efforts. Towns that used to earn money from recycled waste are now forced to pay as much as $70 a ton to have it hauled to landfills or incinerators.
“These new policies have made it much harder for every recycler,” said Austin Mc-knight, general manager of the Charlestown plant, which processes about 230,000 tons of paper, plastic, glass, and other material every year, more than any similar facility in New England. “Everyone’s struggling now.”
The problems began last summer, when Chinese officials announced as part of a major antipollution campaign that they would no longer import 24 materials, including mixed paper and a range of plastics.
The Chinese also vowed to accept far less cardboard and scrap metal, limiting the items to those with impurities of just 0.5 percent. They previously took material that was far more tainted by food scraps and other non-recyclables.
Since the new policy went into effect on Jan. 1, US exports of recyclable material to China have plunged. Facilities such as the one in Charlestown have slowed their sorting process to reduce the amount of impurities in the bales of material they ship abroad, but plant owners say their equipment can’t reach such levels of purity.
At E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company in Westborough, the plant’s parking lot has been overtaken by about 5,000 tons of paper and cardboard that it hasn’t been able to discard. Usually, the company would have a few hundred tons stockpiled until it received a decent price for the material.
Now, with 400 tons of new material coming in every day — only about half of which they can recycle — the company has been paying to send as much of the refuse away as possible, taking a significant loss.
“This really impacts the bottom line,” said Ben Harvey, the company’s president, adding that revenue has plummeted by about a quarter since January. “We’re feeling it right now, but the municipalities we collect from are going to feel the impact well into the future.”
Many of them are already feeling it. In Rockland, for example, residents were paying $3 a ton to have their recyclables collected and hauled away; now they’re paying $70. Abington is now paying $62 a ton, up from zero.
In Plymouth, the costs spiked so much that town officials last week eliminated its curbside recycling program.
“It’s a very bad situation, all around,” said Claire Galkowski, executive director of the South Shore Recycling Cooperative, which oversees programs in 15 communities. “All of them have experienced cost increases to a various extent.”
The problem, she and others said, is that US sorting facilities have been sending too many bales of tainted material abroad, particularly to China, India, and Vietnam.
With the rise of single-stream recycling, many residents have become less conscientious about what they deposit in recycling bins, with everything from bowling balls to Christmas lights fouling up the machines at sorting plants, she said.
In Braintree, where the cost of recycling has risen from about $4 a ton last year to $47, local officials are worried about what will happen in the coming months.
“It’s already having a big impact, but it keeps going up,” said Rosemary Nolan, the town’s solid waste and recycling coordinator. “We’ve been told it could go up to $200 a ton.”
If the costs continue to rise, she worries the town may have to cut other services, such as education or transportation projects. “The runaway escalation isn’t sustainable,” she said.
Boston officials didn’t respond to questions about the impact of China’s new policies on the city.
Some local officials and recycling companies have been urging the state to take action to help defray the costs. State officials declined to answer questions, but in a statement said they are seeking to mitigate local costs with a variety of programs and efforts.
For example, they said, they are working with municipalities to create a common list of acceptable recyclables for residents and have been encouraging new glass recycling businesses to move to Massachusetts, since glass constitutes about 20 percent of the state’s recycling stream.
The state Department of Environmental Protection “will continue to work with neighboring states and companies to ensure responsible recycling continues,” said Ed Coletta, a spokesman for the agency.
The crisis has also sparked tensions between municipalities and the companies that collect their recycling.
Last month, New Bedford filed a lawsuit against ABC Disposal Service, after the New Bedford-based company threatened to stop collecting recyclables there, as well as in Fairhaven, Mattapoisett, Rochester, and Plymouth. The company had increased rates in response to the rising costs.
In a letter to the company, local officials acknowledged that ABC Disposal’s costs had risen as a result of China’s new policies but asked to review the company’s financial records before agreeing to modify their contacts to allow higher rates.
“ABC’s mere assertions that it needs contract increases in order to survive are an insufficient basis on which to impose an additional burden on taxpayers,” they wrote.
After the company refused, New Bedford filed the lawsuit, claiming the company was breaching its contracts.
“The company’s repeated refusals to share its financial information with the city, as well as its recent conflicting statements about whether it will comply with its contract, have left the city no choice but to seek a court order that will protect taxpayers,” New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said in a statement.
Michael Camara, the company’s chief executive, said his costs have surged and he has no choice but to pass them on to customers.
ABC Disposal used to earn as much as $45 a ton for the recyclables his employees collected; now the company is paying $100 a ton, he said. Moreover, his company now has to deliver the material to plants as far away as Stamford, Conn., costing it far more in gas and time.
He also lamented the environmental consequences, noting that the recyclables are taking up precious space in landfills in Massachusetts.
“It’s insane what has happened,” he said. “This is an international crisis. We just can’t absorb these costs.”
SOURCE
Doomsday Climate Models Wrong Again! Hurricanes Declining …European Floods Not More Frequent
Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue pointed out here at Twitter that hurricane activity has not lived up to the climate model projections and that major hurricanes in the 1970s and 80s were “likely underestimated.” The hurricane expert tweeted:
Over the past 4-decades, number of global HURRICANE strength tropical cyclones (about 48/year) have actually DECREASED, while MAJOR hurricane strength tropical cyclones (about 25/year) have slightly (insignificant) trended upward.”
And:
Over the past 10-years (120-months) there have been 232 major hurricane strength tropical cyclones globally. In the 10-years prior, there were 252 majors. And the 10-years before that 258 majors. We likely underestimated majors in 1970s & early 1980s prior to Hi-Res satellites.”
No trend in flooding in Europe
And at the Die kalte Sonne site here, geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt report in Europe that floods and storms In Europe have not been more frequent, despite all the unending claims by the media.
Over the past week, the German media hyped up some local, severe thunderstorms that had hit in parts of the country, causing heavy downpours and local flooding.
The media injected their usual Biblical tones in their reports.
Lüning and Vahrenholt first cite a recent study, which was even featured in detail by German DLF public radio, which tells us that the frequency and severity of heavy rain events and flooding have not increased in Europe over the past 150 years:
Severe weather in Europe: Flooding not more than in the past
When it comes to torrential rainfall and flooding, many people agree: Such things never happened in the past. But that is not true Dominik Paprotny of the University of Technology in Delft analyzed. Historical sources show that large floods are not more frequent today.”
And DLF Nova reported:
Danger of flooding is the same as it was 150 years ago
High water and flooding in Europe has not become more frequent at all, a team of scientists in the Netherlands show. The scientists have put together a databank that looks at storms and floods back to 1870. Most international databanks go back to only to 1970.”
Read more at DLF Nova.
The study by Paprotny et al. 2018 appeared in Nature Communications and it can be downloaded free of charge as a pdf file. In the abstract:
Trends in flood losses in Europe over the past 150 years
[…] Here we utilize a gridded reconstruction of flood exposure in 37 European countries and a new database of damaging floods since 1870. Our results indicate that, after correcting for changes in flood exposure, there has been an increase in annually inundated area and number of persons affected since 1870, contrasted by a substantial decrease in flood fatalities. For more recent decades we also found a considerable decline in financial losses per year.”
The recent flare-up in honesty in media “remarkable”!
Lüning and Vahrenholt then go on to express their surprise that the DLF would present the scientific results so “honestly and without climate alarmist undertones.” and that “it is remarkable for today’s mainstream journalism”, which over the years tended to link every summer thunderstorm to Co2 emitted by man.
Flooding was worse during Little Ice Age
Next Lüning and Vahrenholt present studies showing that flooding in Central Europe and in the Alps region was even worse during the Little Ice Age than it is today, see here, here, here, and here.
Potsdam Institute contradicted:
Lüning and Vahrenholt next dismiss earlier claims by the climate alarmist Potsdam Institute, which earlier claimed “robust trends” concerning “summertime dry periods and greater occurrence of flooding” in the German state of Saxony Anhalt (pdf here).
The two German skeptic scientists examined the official data from the German DWD national weather service for Saxony Anhalt, and found the following:
Summer precipitation in Sachsen Anhalt since 1880. Data source: DWD.
Lüning and Vahrenholt summarize with four main points:
The linear trend for precipitation since 1881 is zero.
Summer weather in Central Europe is controlled by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), i.e. natural ocean cycles.
The weather is not getting more extreme. The year-to-year differences in summertime precipitation are, in fact, showing a slight downward trend.
In Saxony Anhalt, despite all the alarmist claims, there is no anthropogenic signal.
More
HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Q&A: The Politically Incorrect Book That Debunks Climate Change Myths
Marc Morano, founding editor of the award-winning website ClimateDepot.com, recently authored “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” He spoke to Daily Signal Editor-in-Chief Rob Bluey about climate change myths and other facts you probably haven’t heard reported by the media. An edited transcript of their interview is below. You can also listen to it on The Daily Signal podcast.
Rob Bluey: What prompted your interest in the issue of climate change? There’s a great photo of you in the book next to a wanted poster. How did you become such a villain to the left?
Marc Morano: I always said I was a Republican, except when it came to environmental issues. I remember not liking James Watt, the former interior secretary. I remember not liking President Ronald Reagan’s environmental policies. I always wanted to be a forest ranger as a kid growing up. I got heavily involved emotionally in watching all the documentaries about the Amazon rainforest back in the 1980s and 1990s.
It wasn’t until I started reading Dixy Lee Ray and actually hearing her talk, it was actually on Rush Limbaugh’s show, the coverage of the Rio Earth Summit, that I started to look deeper into environmental issues. What I remember her specifically saying, as a nuclear physicist, Dixy Lee Ray, that the Amazon was one of the most intact forests and this idea that it’s about to disappear was complete exaggeration and hype. I started investigating that. It actually culminated in a documentary on the Amazon rainforest.
Global warming, when I started focusing on it, I actually started with a skeptical view and I was only able to get more and more skeptical, because I saw the same tactics being used.
The way I ended up in the wanted poster in Paris—that was the movie premier of my film “Climate Hustle” from 2015 at a Paris cinema. The environmental groups put out wanted posters of me the day of the premier. All over the city, this was literally on the main streets of Paris. So I posed with one of them in the book and you can see the picture. They called me a “climate criminal wanted for climate crimes.” This is the kind of intimidation they like to do.
Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” in Paris. (Photo Courtesy of Marc Morano)
Bluey: Despite that intimidation, you’ve still gone on to write this book. So what prompted you to do that and what’s your goal when a reader picks it up? What do you want them to walk away with?
Morano: My goal here was to help conservatives and Republicans articulate the issue. During my time on Capitol Hill, I worked for the Senate Environment of Public Works Committee. I can’t tell you the horror stories, Rob, of being in high-level meetings, during the height of the cap-and-trade debate 2007, 2008, 2009; back when President Barack Obama was pushing this through all the way to 2010.
The staffers of very conservative Republican senators would be like, “Well, we don’t want to touch the science on this because we don’t want to be seen as against the Earth or against the environment. Let’s just solely focus on the economics.”
I remember arguing passionately. If people think we face the climate catastrophe, we’re Americans! They’re going to say we will bear any cost and overcome it. They never wanted to challenge it. So I’m trying to, and working for Sen. James Inhofe, we tried to challenge the science.
What I tried to do with this book is say it’s OK to espouse climate skepticism. The book is done for anyone from, I would say, sixth grade through highest levels of education to educate them with the top voices in science, the basic concepts, and to make it fun, informative in a talking point form.
This is a needed book because in order to fulfill President Trump’s policies, you need the scientific justification, and this book fills that gap in, as well as talks about the policy.
Bluey: The other thing the book has is a lot of great facts that I think counter what you so often hear in the media and from liberal politicians. Could you share some of them? I know you have examples right on the cover. For instance, let’s take hurricanes because we’re in the midst right now of another hurricane story. You hear this all the time—that these hurricanes are more intense, they’re happening more often because of climate change. You say, “No.”
Morano: Not only do I say “no,” but the peer-reviewed scientific literature clearly and overwhelmingly says “no.”
There is nothing unusual, particularly on extreme weather. It’s not just hurricanes. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, on the entire spectrum of extreme weather, we are either at stable or declining trends. And that includes droughts.
California droughts in previous centuries blew away anything we’re talking about now. Floods, no trends on 100-year, 85-year time scales. Hurricanes were much worse, many more powerful hurricanes in the 1940s and ’50s. In fact, we were in the longest period of no major hurricane category three or larger before last year’s big hurricanes hit. And even though there is this alleged record rains, in the 1960s hurricanes that hit Cuba had many more times rain and flooding events than that.
“They make it seem like extreme weather is everywhere. But taken as a whole, and in the peer-reviewed literature, it’s actually on a declining trend.”
I go into that in the book about these so-called 1,000-year floods and I explain that all these extreme weather events they claim, it’s kind of like a lottery promotion scam. Where they say, “Oh, this is a 1,000-year storm hit this city, and a 1,000-year storm hit that, this is unusual.” No, there are going to be very few lottery winners. But the lottery winners there are, they highlight them. “Look, there’s a lottery winner and there’s a lottery, look the lottery winners are everywhere.” They make it seem like extreme weather is everywhere. But taken as a whole, and in the peer-reviewed literature, it’s actually on a declining trend.
Interestingly enough, cold weather is actually more extreme than warm weather. In the 1970s, they blamed tornadoes, floods, even the threat of war and increased violence on global cooling at the time. So there’s just not the science there at all, when it comes to that. And also I go through all the other myths you’ve heard about from the hottest year on record, the hottest decade.
Bluey: Let’s tackle that one because we hear this one it seems month after month—another record-breaking month. At the same time, I love the chart that The Daily Signal published of the temperature throughout history. You see the lines going up and down. Tell us what we need to know.
Morano: First of all, in the book, I interviewed geologists, I have Nobel Prize-winning scientists endorse the book. They explain that in the geologic history of the Earth, we are in the coldest 10 percent of the geologic history of the Earth. In other words, 90 percent of our Earth’s history was too warm to have ice at either pole. So we are in the 10 percent coldest. That’s No. 1.
No. 2, if you go back to the Roman warming periods during the time that Jesus Christ walked the Earth—and I show this in the peer-reviewed studies in the book, in a very reader-friendly way—we are actually now cooler than we were. So we’ve cooled since the time Jesus Christ walked the Earth. We’re actually about the same temperature or cooler since the medieval warm period, since about 900 to 1300.
First of all, you say hottest year, what time scale? Then, you jump ahead to about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age, where the New York river, New York Harbor froze over, the Thames river was frozen, it was a brutal period, coinciding with low sun spot activity and bunch of other factors.
Suddenly, we get thermometer data. So the thermometer data comes online right at the end of the Little Ice Age. It’s very cold. All these things you hear about the glaciers retreating, most of that glacier retreat happened by 1900. Now, 80 percent of the carbon dioxide came after 1940, or after World War II in 1945. We had a huge warm spell from the 1920s into the ’30s and then, we had a cooling period from the ’50s all the way up to about the late 1970s. I go into the whole global cooling scare.
“The so-called claims of the hottest year fall easily within the margin of error. That’s why it’s a political statement. It is utter nonsense from beginning to end.”
They now claim, “Oh, that never happened.” They have studies out, they claim that that was overblown, there’s only a couple scientists. I show in the book it was National Academy of Sciences, CIA, some of the same scientists warning of global cooling in the ’70s who then flipped and became global warming.
I actually feature in the book an article from the 1977 and ’78 in The New York Times, two articles. During this time, the scientists were battling it out when global cooling was morphing into a climate change, global warming.
To answer the question on the hottest year, we warm from the late ’70s to the late ’90s. Then essentially we flatlined. Essentially, there’s no statistically significant global warming. We had a thing called “the pause.” They didn’t like that, so they actually went back in the records and erased the pause. They changed the data.
Besides, even doing all that, the hottest year claims are within hundredths of a degree and that margin of error is tenths of a degree and they adjust the temperatures to within tenths of a degree without explanations. The so-called claims of the hottest year fall easily within the margin of error. That’s why it’s a political statement. It is utter nonsense from beginning to end.
It’s a fancy way of saying the temperature hasn’t changed since the ’90s. That’s where they get hottest decade on record. On record just means since the Little Ice Age ended, when we put thermometer data out and that’s what that means. If you go back further, we’ve cooled, Middle Ages, Roman warming period, and even further.
Bluey: Thank you for setting the record straight on that. One of the other things that you argue is that the left has abandoned this fact-based science and instead resorted to just dramatic fear-mongering. What do you mean?
Morano: Go back to the 19th century, Rob, to explain this. Every storm is allegedly unprecedented, we’ve never seen it, this is the new normal, so to speak. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Katrina. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Harvey. The same lines over and over. Everything is done as a tactic of fear in order to get action. This started in the 1960s with the modern environmental movement.
Particularly, I go into a little bit about Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb.” I actually show, Rob, that they use this hysteria for the different environmental scares in the 1970s, whether it’s resource scarcity, over-population, rainforest clearing, et cetera.
They will say, “We need a global solution; we need global governance; we need wealth redistribution; we need sovereignty threatening treaty, or some kind of economic activity limiting.” No matter what environmental scare in the past that they tried to scare people with, it was the same solutions they’re proposing now.
In the book, I go back and show over and over that global warming is merely the latest scare they’re using to get their agenda. I show Naomi Klein, who’s an adviser to Pope Francis, who wrote “Capitalism vs. the Climate.” I interviewed her for the book. She actually says that they would be seeking the same solutions even if there was no global warming and that essentially, capitalism is incompatible with a livable climate. She actually urges people, “We need to jump on this because solving global warming will solve what we’ve been trying to achieve all along.”
They’re open about it. They use the climate scare tactics to achieve their ends. And in order to get those ends achieved, they have to hype and scare. It’s been a very effective strategy because they’ve bullied Republican politicians, who should know better, into at least submissiveness and silence and/or activism, when you come to the case with John McCain and even Mitt Romney.
Climate change activists want to have it both ways to advance their agenda, argues author Marc Morano. (Photo: Erik Mcgregor/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Bluey: What are some of the strangest things that you’ve seen the left blame climate change on?
Morano: There’s a whole series of things. One of the things they do is they make opposite predictions. Global warming will cause more snow, less snow. More hurricanes, less hurricanes. More fog, less fog. More malaria, less malaria. I go through it all.
It’s as if you bet on the Super Bowl, and you bet both teams to win. You can go to the office the next day and say, “I did it! I won! I bet on the winning team.” First of all, they’re never wrong because they literally have opposite predictions.
The second thing is they come up with everything. Global warming will cause an increase in prostitution, bar room brawls, vehicle thefts. These are by United Nations scientists who did these studies, funded by major universities. These aren’t just some wacky claim, or some professor talking off the top of his head. They actually get funded studies to do this.
“They actually blame the rise of Hitler on global warming. … There are so many wacky things that they’ll blame on global warming.”
One of my favorites was in 1941, a University of Cincinnati professor said that the warmer weather we were having in the 1930s and ’40s created more docile people, which led to them being more susceptible to Hitler, Mussolini, and dictators. They actually blame the rise of Hitler on global warming at that time. Oddly enough, Hitler was saved in the bunker when Von Stauffenberg tried to kill him. Because it was a very hot day, they had to move the location of that meeting when the assassination attempt happened. They moved it to a room with a heavy table that saved Hitler. Global warming created Hitler, global warming saved Hitler.
There are so many wacky things that they’ll blame on global warming. My favorite quote is probably Michael Oppenheimer, U.N. lead scientist, former Environmental Defense Fund activist, “Anybody who eats is under threat from climate change.” That’s his summation. So there you go. It’s that combination of just about everything. If you eat, then you’re under threat of climate change, you should be worried. If you don’t eat, then you’re fine.
Even when you’re dead, you won’t escape the clutches of global warming. In the book, I show multiple examples. In one case, Peruvian mummies are decaying faster because of the humidity caused by climate change. Also, they’re worried that dead bodies in the permafrost in Siberia are melting and are going to release new pathogens. The dead walk among us because of global warming. So, even the dead are now to blame for exacerbating the problem of global warming.
Bluey: We’ve used these terms interchangeably: climate change and global warming. Can the left make up its mind on what to call it?
Morano: No, in fact, in the book, I have a lot of fun. “Global climate disruption” was John Holdren, Obama’s former science czar. He wanted to call it that. “Global weirding” is what Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, wants to call it. They’ve come up with all these different names. “Global heating.”
Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, when I was in the Senate Environment Public Works Committee, she actually called the hearing “global warming” one time. This was when they were really trying to push climate change. Temperatures hit their peak in the late 1990s from the cooling of the 1970s. They’ve tried to push climate change because they didn’t think without that constant increase in temperature, they weren’t getting anywhere. It was getting harder to sell.
“[C]limate change had to be the new moniker because global warming was too focused on temperature.”
Climate change includes the extreme weather. I remember very vividly, I was in Bali, Indonesia—a $15,000 roundtrip business class flight for the U.S. Senate at a global warming hearing for the United Nations—arguing with a John McCain climate staffer about how the new argument in global warming was all going to be about extreme weather.
Therefore, climate change had to be the new moniker because global warming was too focused on temperature. They wanted to go out on every limb and this way they could blame everything from cows and transportation, airlines.
They’re trying to get every aspect of our society under global warming regulation and not just focus on temperature. Because now if you have a bad crop, if you have vehicle crash—the Department of Transportation got us funding to study how global warming could increase fatal car accidents—that’s why it has to be “climate change,” because they’re trying to go in every direction.
Bluey: How have the left’s policies, as you argue in the book, hurt the world’s poor?
Morano: That is one of the most insidious things. In the book, I feature Al Gore at a Bill Gates function, saying that Africa’s projected to have more people than China and India combined in the next century and that we need “ubiquitous fertility management.”
This is a white, wealthy Western politician saying essentially there are too many black Africans. Let’s be blunt about it. I actually quote a former Harvard professor just excoriating Al Gore for essentially racist comments. Basically singling out Africa and saying, “They’ve got to have better fertility management because we have too many Africans and we’ve got to control their population.” Now Al Gore would just say, “No, I’m thinking of only the Earth.” But what conservative politician could get away with that?
“Fossil fuels are the most abundant, cheaply available, and fastest way out of energy poverty, which means they’re the lifeline for lowering infant mortality, longer life expectancy, modern dentistry.”
When you look at third-world development—and by the way, “third world” is a politically incorrect term; we’re supposed to say the “developing world”—they have about 1.1 billion people without running water and electricity. Essentially, what they’re trying to do with climate policy is prevent them from developing through fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are the most abundant, cheaply available, and fastest way out of energy poverty, which means they’re the lifeline for lowering infant mortality, longer life expectancy, modern dentistry.
If you’re living in a poor nation, you’re burning dung, you’re living in a hut made of dung, you’re breathing in horrible air, the rivers are polluted from sewage. The second you get modern sewage, the second you get coal plants even or oil or even nuclear, if you’re lucky enough, everything gets radically cleaner. They’re trying to prevent it. Even the World Bank won’t allow coal plant development in countries that are in dire poverty.
These environmentalists I interviewed, one in South Africa, they travel the world from Minnesota and other places—wealthy, white Western college kids—go to Africa and essentially say, “You’re doing it right by living this primitive existence. You’re living it right. You’re Earth-friendly.”
I interviewed Jerry Brown, the California governor, at an Earth Summit in South Africa. He actually says the Earth can’t allow the rest of the world to develop like the United States and Europe because we’d need 20 more Earths to do it. In other words, they have to be managed. It’s a new form of colonialism. It’s the most insidious things. That’s a very intense chapter in the book because it’s an eye-opener for people who haven’t been following this. They are trying to limit their development.
The environmental activists—climate activists—they even have something called the U.N. Climate Fund. I interviewed a South African development activist, Leon Lowe, who’s very articulate. He just says, “The developing world needs to tell the first world to essentially go to hell if they’re going to tell them how to develop, what resources they can use of their own.”
He says, “Until London, Rotterdam, Paris, and Washington level their cities, return them to swamps and wetlands and jungles, they have no business telling the developing world how they can use the natural resources, how they can develop, what energy they can use.”
That’s the dilemma we’re facing now. They’re trying to control and manage people and keep them at a subsistence level of life. It’s the most anti-human movement of today. It’s why former Czech President Václav Klaus has said, the greatest threat we face today for human freedom is, what he says, “ambitions environmentalism from the climate movement.”
Bluey: In addition to writing the book, you run a website called ClimateDepot.com. What’s your mission? What do you strive to do there?
What I’m trying to do there is have a daily one-stop shop of all the latest climate, energy, and environmental news. In other words, I link to all the mainstream sources, but I’ll try to pick out some of the best tidbits and actually try to do reality checks all the time. I do special reports.
It’s a way for you to get your energy, climate, environment news without just having to hear the mantra of nonsense, of 97 percent of all scientists agree the Earth is doomed, we’re facing a catastrophe, we need the Paris Agreement.
I have user guides. I have special reports and I have a lot of humor to try to bring people in—to say this is not an intimidating topic. Don’t be afraid to stand up because the whole movement is designed—the environmental left has designed this to intimidate everyone into silence on this issue. If you’re against climate change, belief in climate change, catastrophic climate change, you are a dumb person. You are an idiot. You’re a rube. You’re not welcome in polite society. Even the impolite don’t want you.
Bluey: Marc, thanks so much. Again, the book is called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” Thanks for writing it.
Morano: Thank you, Rob. Appreciate it, enjoyed it.
SOURCE
Germany’s Wind Energy Mess: As Subsidies Expire, Thousands Of Turbines To Shut Down … Environmental Nightmare!
The Swiss national daily Baseler Zeitung here recently reported how Germany’s wind industry is facing a potential “abandonment”.
Over the years Germany has made approvals for new wind parks more difficult as the country reels from an unstable power grid and growing protests against the blighted landscapes and health hazards.
Now that the wind energy boom has ended, the Baseler Zeitung reports that “the shutdown of numerous wind turbines could soon lead to a drop in production” after having seen years of ruddy growth.
Today a large number of Germany’s 29,000 total turbines nationwide are approaching 20 years old and for the most part they are outdated.
Worse: the generous subsidies granted at the time of their installation are slated to expire soon and thus make them unprofitable. After 2020, thousands of these turbines will lose their subsidies with each passing year, which means they will be taken offline and mothballed.
The Baseler Zeitung writes: “In many cases the earnings will not be able to cover the continued operation costs of the turbines. After 20 years of operation, the turbines require more maintenance and some expensive repairs.”
The Baseler Zeitung adds that some 5700 turbines with an installed capacity of 45 MW will see their subsidies run out by 2020. The Swiss daily reports further:
“The German Windenergie federal association estimates that approximately 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity will lose their subsidies by 2023, which is more than a quarter of the German wind energy capacity.”
So with new turbines coming online only slowly, it’s entirely possible that wind energy output in Germany will recede in the coming years, thus making the country appear even less serious about climate protection.
Wind turbine dump in Africa?
So what happens to the old turbines that will get taken offline?
Windpark owners hope to send their scrapped wind turbine clunkers to third world buyers, Africa for example. But if these buyers instead opt for new energy systems, then German wind park operators will be forced to dismantle and recycle them – a costly endeavor, the Baseler Zeitung reports.
Impossible to recycle composite materials
The problem here are the large blades, which are made of fiberglass composite materials and whose components cannot be separated from each other. Burning the blades is extremely difficult, toxic and energy-intensive. So naturally there’s a huge incentive for German wind park operators to dump the old contraptions onto third world countries, and to let them deal later with the garbage.
Sweeping garbage under the rug
Next the Baseler Zeitung brings up the disposal of the massive 3000-tonne reinforced concrete turbine base, which according to German law must be removed.
Some of these concrete bases reach depths of 20 meters and penetrate multiple ground layers, the Baseler Zeitung reports, adding:
“The complete removal of the concrete base can quickly run up to several hundreds of thousands of euros. Many wind park operators have not made the corresponding provisions for this expense.”
Already wind park operators are circumventing this huge expense by only removing the top two meters of the concrete and steel base, and then hiding the rest with a layer of soil, the Baseler writes.
In the end most of the concrete base will remain as garbage buried in the ground, and the above-ground turbine litter will likely get shipped to third world countries.
That’s Germany’s Energiewende and contribution to protecting the environment and climate!
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
