Another Year Of Useless Climate Madness Looms

The year 2019 saw the rapid rise of climate hysteria, but as the saying goes: “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”

Now that the hysteria is firmly established and well organized, it is sure to get bigger and louder. But I see very little coming from it except the noise, as long as skeptics keep up the good fight.

This is especially true in the U.S. Presidential race, which is climate policy-wise by far the biggest thing going on in the world. Many of the Democrat candidates are going to try to ride the hysterical wave to victory. Their winning is not likely.

My take is the further left you go the fewer votes you get, and these folks are going far left on climate.

In my view the only viable candidate in the pack is Biden and he may not be crazy enough to get the nod. Nor can he beat Trump, so things are looking good on that front.

Another big unknown is what the hysterical demonstrators are going to do. Bigger marches? More disruption? (The police now have glue remover.) Or maybe something we have not seen before, hopefully not more violent.

I am sure the advocacy insider email traffic is buzzing over this. (Maybe some new wacky signs. “I don’t want to die!” seems to be catching on.)

For that matter, will the hysterics endorse specific candidates for the Democrat nomination? Or perhaps get active in specific Congressional races? They might even form their own party (but Greta Thunberg cannot run, more’s the pity).

Political action seems like the logical next step for the extremists, which could further destabilize the green movement, given that most of the political action groups are moderates.

There are lots of other climate crunch points in progress as well. In a recent meeting, the EU failed to come up with a more ambitious emission reduction goal for 2030, despite its hysterical leadership calling for one.

The next meeting on this proposal will be in June. No doubt we will see lots of “Action Now!” marches and demonstrations then, but ambition may well be lacking at the EU national member level, which is all that counts.

Several countries are already missing their 2020 target and there are anti-action demonstrations too boot, from yellow vests to farmers and coal miners. The political leaders are running a bit scared of this stuff.

The UN will have several semi-summits, leading up to the grand COP 26 in Glasgow, beginning in November. Given what happened in Madrid’s COP 25 we are likely to witness the progressive collapse of the entire UN climate action process.

The UN’s Paris Accord process is entirely too slow and compromising for the Action Now! hysterics to tolerate. This will be especially certain if the Action Now! hysteria builds in 2020, which is very likely.

That the mythical $100 billion a year promised to the developing countries does not show up in Glasgow will compound the collapse.

Then too there is a lot going on at national levels around the world. Especially promising is the rapid rise of new populist parties that oppose the drastic actions demanded by the Action Now! radicals.

Left-wing hysteria typically generates a conservative reaction. How could it not? Angry mobs are dangerous.

Mind you I expect to see a lot of meaninglessly symbolic green action in response to the hysterical noise-making. This includes toothless declarations of “climate emergency” and pointless promises of zero emissions by far off 2050. Politicians promising the impossible, to be delivered in the far distant future, do no harm. Hence their popularity.

My definition of winning the great climate change debate is that no serious harm is done by the alarmists.

While I expect an escalating crescendo of hysterical shrieking during the course of 2020, the reason will be that my side is winning and the loud side is losing.

As things stand now, skeptics have a chance to win big in 2020, but we must keep the pressure on. Hold your nose, plug your ears, and hit them hard. You ain’t seen nothin yet.

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​Trump trashes the Green New Deal at TPUSA Summit
 
On Sunday, President Donald Trump spoke at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he trashed the Green New Deal and all who support the disastrous plan.

"The Green New Deal, I think it's a wonderful thing I do want to think about it. I want to study it closely. I want to see whether or not we should use airplanes again," Trump said sarcastically.

"How about the senator from Hawaii, nasty, nasty horrible...what she says is so mean and so angry. She's not the smartest person on the planet. She wants the Green New Deal, and they informed her that that doesn't include airplanes. And they said, what are you going to do? And they talked about building a trail to Hawaii," Trump said.

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Climate alarmist banks go carbon-colonialist

Africa must move forward without them, using fossil and nuclear energy to build prosperity

Paul Driessen and David Wojick

Africa has the world’s lowest electrification rate. Its power consumption per capita is just 613 kilowatt-hours per year, compared to 6,500 kWh in Europe and 13,000 in the United States, African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina observed in July 2017. That’s 9.4% of EU and 4.7% of US electricity consumption. It’s equivalent to Americans having electricity only 1 hour a day, 8 hours a week, 411 hours per year – at totally unpredictable times, for a few minutes, hours or days at a stretch.

It’s actually even worse than that. Excluding significantly electrified South Africa, sub-Saharan Africans consume an almost irrelevant 181 kWh of electricity per capita – 1.4% of the average American’s!

In Sub-Saharan Afria, over 600 million people have no electricity, and over 700 million rely on wood, grass and dung for cooking and heating. The region is home to 16% of the world’s population, and 53% of those without electricity. By 2050, its urban populations could increase by 600 million.

Determined to transform the “dark continent,” the AfDB launched a $12-billion New Deal on Energy in 2017 and a Light Up and Power Africa initiative in July 2018. It frequently emphasized that access to sufficient supplies of reliable, affordable modern energy – including fossil fuels – is critical for the continent’s social and economic development. Without energy, it is impossible to create jobs, increase productivity, reduce inequality, improve people’s health and wellbeing, or end poverty.

The bank’s lofty goal for its energy New Deal is 100% access to electricity in urban areas, and 95% in rural areas, by 2025. In July 2017, Mr. Adesina told the African Union Summit he was excited that “Japan has answered our call” to “adopt a balanced energy mix” that includes “its ultra-super critical clean coal technologies” that remove sulfur, nitrogen oxides and particulates, while greatly reducing CO2 emissions.

In 2018, the bank approved seed money for a Nigerian coal project and geared up to finance a 350MW coal plant in Senegal. It also initiated plans for a $2-billion coal-fired power station in the Kenya’s port city of Lamu, after the IMF, World Bank and other western lenders rebuffed Kenya.

But then Mr. Adesina and the AfDB caved in to carbon colonialist pressure. The bank now says almost nothing about coal or even natural gas. Its new themes include: responding to global concerns about climate change, gradually adopting a “low-carbon and sustainable growth path,” significantly reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and transitioning to “green growth” and “clean renewable energy,”

In September 2019, the bank announced that it planned to begin scrapping coal-fired power plants all across Africa, build “the largest solar zone” in the world, and pull funding for the Lamu power plant. “We’re getting out of coal,” Mr. Adesina said. “Coal is the past, and renewable energy is the future.”

So the AfDB has joined the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and other Multilateral anti-Development Banks in caring more about climate alarmism and avoiding criticism from the likes of Greta, the perpetually aggrieved and angry Grinch of Christmas 2019 – than they do about safeguarding the lives, livelihoods, health and living standards of hundreds of millions of electricity-deprived Africans.

This 180-degree flip-flop is delusional, dysfunctional and disingenuous. For many, it will be lethal.

First, there is nothing “green,” “clean” or “renewable” about wind and solar energy. The vast amounts of land and raw materials, mines and factories required to build wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – to harness widely dispersed, insufficient, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy to benefit Sub-Saharan Africans – are anything but clean, green, renewable or sustainable. In fact, trying to meet those needs would require millions of turbines and billions of solar panels.

Second, The AfDB cannot possibly achieve its Energy New Deal or Light Up and Power Africa goals with wind and solar. It will never reach 100% or even 25% access to meaningful electricity that way. No country has ever built or sustained a modern economy this way – and countries that have tried to by mandating wind, solar and fossil-fuel-free economies are paying a terrible price. Headlines tell the story.

Germany’s green suicide: Industrial job losses top 80,000. German wind industry faces extinction. 340,000 German families have pricey electricity cut off. British steel faces insolvency; British families are already deeply in debt to their energy suppliers, before winter even sets in. Meanwhile, the fossil and nuclear-based US economy added another 266,000 jobs in November and wages also grew.

Third, there is no evidence to support claims that temperatures, droughts and weather anywhere in Africa are unprecedented or due to carbon dioxide from fossil fuels – or from wood, grass and dung fires. They and other climate changes have been common throughout history, and an energy-rich, prosperous Africa will be far better able to deal with future changes than a poor, energy-deprived continent could.

Fourth, China, India, Indonesia and other countries are not going stop building coal- and gas-fired power plants – and emitting enormously more CO2. Why should Africa and the AfDb go down a different path?

Finally, banishing fossil fuels (and nuclear), and focusing on pseudo-renewable energy will mean millions of children and parents will continue to suffer and die needlessly every year from diseases of poverty and energy deprivation. This eco-manslaughter at the hands of climate activists and banks must not continue.

Africans have a fundamental human right to more than the few light bulbs, cell phone charging stations and one-cubic-foot refrigerators that can be supported by a wind turbine and solar panel economy.

Thankfully, Botswana, Tanzania and other countries recognize that their continent is rich in coal, oil, natural gas, hydro and uranium. They intend to utilize those resources, take charge of their destinies, develop their economies and improve their people’s lives – by building coal- and gas-fired power plants, hydroelectric facilities, and pebble bed modular or other nuclear power plants. They will also install wind turbines and solar panels in distant villages until electrical grids bring 24/7/365 power to the villages.

No single solution will work everywhere. But “under no circumstances are we going to apologize” for developing Africa’s oil, gas and coal fields, Equatorial Guinea energy minister Gabriel Obiang Lima has said, adding it is “criminal” for any non-African to suggest that Africa should ignore any resources it has. 

“Energy is the catalyst for growth,” says Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s new Mineral Resources and Energy Minister and national chair of its African National Congress. Africa has long exported its oil and gas to the rest of the world, while remaining energy-deficient itself, he noted during a recent Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town. That is no longer tenable. His new Integrated Resources Plan includes coal and nuclear, and all forms of energy, as appropriate to a given time and situation.

South Africa’s trade unions now see that solar and wind will not create jobs or prosperity; they promote coal power for inland areas where coal is plentiful, and nuclear for coastal regions where water can cool reactors. Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Rwanda all appear prepared to join SA in going nuclear – and Zambia has a new Zambian Atomic Energy Agency (ZAMATOM), headed by Dr. Roland Msiska; it has begun building a nuclear center and preparing for a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors.

“I am tired of being lectured by people in rich countries who have never lived a day without electricity,” says Nigerian Sam Bada. “Maybe they should just go home and turn off their fridge, hot water, laptops and lights. Then live like that for a month and tell us, who have suffered for years, not to burn coal.”

Energy deprivation perpetuates economic deprivation – and creates breeding grounds for terrorist groups in weakened African nations. Recent Islamic State attacks underscore this growing danger. Meanwhile, too many banks lack the moral decency to stand up for fossil fuels or nuclear, or question climate alarm doctrine. If they continue to balk, China could well step in – and gain greater influence and expanded control of Africa’s raw materials in the process. It would be much better if Africa stood up for itself.

Every new power plant generates electricity, jobs, better living standards, and more tax revenues to build more power plants, transmission lines and prosperity. Every country can do this, just as China, India and other nations have already. There’d be no better holiday gift than to banish Greta the Grinch from Africa.

Via email




Climate Related Deaths Down 99.9% Since 1932

The Left’s newest Saint, Greta Thunberg, “informed” us during a now famous speech she gave at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in NYC “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.”
She then accused world leaders of doing nothing while “solutions are in sight.”

Speaking of solutions, while the climate is changing, humans are adapting to it. As it turns out, building infrastructure to protect against climate related catastrophes is a heck of a lot easier than altering the world’s temperature through political policies that would require the entire world to sign on. That has been attempted with the Paris Climate Agreement, but even that doesn’t actually bind nations to their pledges to cut carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, adapting to the climate has saved literally millions of lives per year. According to the Cato Institute:

In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939. The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it livable through development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate livable for 7 billion people.

Note that the above information is from an article published in 2014. By 2018, climate related deaths had fallen further to 5,000 that year, or a 99.9% decrease.

Thank God – we didn’t steal Greta’s childhood after all!

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Australia: Green ideology, not climate change, makes bushfires worse

The article by Miranda Devine below is from March 5, 2019 but it has lost none of its relevance

Melissa Price, the new federal Environment Minister, has done untold political damage to a government already divided over climate action by spouting idiotic green propaganda about Victoria’s bushfires.

On Tuesday, she linked the fires to climate change, claiming there is “no doubt” of its impact on Australia.

“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires … There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”

Sorry, minister, it wasn’t climate change that caused the latest bushfires which have so far destroyed nine homes in Victoria, and it wasn’t climate change that killed almost 200 people in the Black Saturday fires ten years ago.

The real culprit is green ideology which opposes the necessary hazard reduction of fuel loads in national parks and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation around their homes.

The ongoing poor management of national parks and state forests in Victoria and green obstruction of fire mitigation strategies has led to dangerously high fuel loads over the past decade.

That means that when fires do inevitably break out they are so intense that they are devilishly difficult for firefighters to contain. As a federal parliamentary inquiry heard in 2003, if you quadruple the ground fuel, you get a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.

Locals know the truth. Andrew Clarke, owner of Jinks Creek Winery, which has been destroyed by a fire which raged out of the Bunyip State Forest, “begged” for fuel reduction burns to protect his property.

“I’ve been begging them [Forest Fire Management Victoria] for 20 years to burn off the state forest at the back of our place and still to this day it hasn’t happened,” he told the ABC’s Country Hour.

Clarke said a planned burn-off was called off because of concerns about nesting birds.

So how did that work out for the birds?

Hundreds of emergency workers have worked across Victoria throughout the week to bring fires under control. Picture: AAP / David Crosling
Just three weeks ago, Victoria’s former chief fire officer Ewan Waller warned that state forest fuel loads were reaching deadly, Black Saturday levels. No one paid any attention.

But you can bet Premier Daniel Andrews will hide behind the climate change furphy.

Parroting green lies suits politicians because then they can avoid blame for their own culpability.

The Black Saturday Bushfire Royal Commission criticised the Victorian government for its failure to reduce fuel loads in state forests. It recommended more than doubling the amount of hazard reduction burns.

Instead, in the last three years, alone, the Andrews government has slashed the amount of public land being hazard reduced by almost two thirds.

It’s a crime.

The wonder is that the Morrison government is helping him with his alibi.

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