Leftists like to take ideas that are initially good and push them to the avaricious extreme in order to gain political power and money. A perfect example of this pertains to the issue of climate change.
It’s a good thing to take care of our environment by not littering and being responsible stewards of resources.
But this message of care has been manipulated by an agenda that is actually retrograding our industry and innovation.
This “climate emergency” idea started as early as the 1970s when activists using faulty science believed it was their job to “save the planet.”
They predicted that if we don’t change our destructive ways (denuding the forest, strangling the planet with greenhouse-gas emissions, etc.), life on the planet will end.
In magazines and newspapers, they predicted a new Ice Age with no signs of warming until 2015. Their prediction never did come to fruition (thank goodness), but the fire and brimstone preaching of these activists only became more urgent and dire.
Even with the improvement in our understanding of weather and climate via cutting-edge scientific tools, meteorologists and climatologists are no closer to a consensus.
Computer models that are tasked with answering some of these prognostications run into layers of variation, making it difficult to predict the atmosphere even a week away let alone years in the future.
As a result of the variation and nuance in climate science, our Thomas Gallatin points out, “the climate modeling predictions from the 1970s are showing themselves to be as close to the mark as any of the modern models run with multiple times the computing power.”
And yet the activists persist in their doomsaying and push to influence politics to further their agenda.
Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and adjunct professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School (and not a conservative by any means), has made a study of the phenomenon of the politicization of climate science.
The belief that climate disaster is near “has profoundly altered the political reality,” he observes in an article for National Review.
“It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges — from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts — or subsume them under the banner of climate change.”
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi has also pointed to the dangers that climate indoctrination is achieving in the policymaking of today. He wrote:
“The agenda means economic hardship for the U.S. I believe young people today are buying into this only because they are indoctrinated into a single way of thinking in the absence of opposing information.”
Bastardi’s words were penned three years ago, and already the climate policies under the Biden administration are decimating the American economy, the rise in the price of gasoline being a prime example.
And as our Mark Alexander has noted, this was by design.
At President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address, he intimated that the ultimate goal of higher gas prices was to force the American people into electric vehicles.
Does he not know that fossil fuels power electric plants? His administration has also dispensed endless red-tape roadblocks to make it difficult for oil and gas companies to do any new drilling to help ease the supply issue.
Even before Biden took office, climate activists — especially in California — had influenced policy in terms of poor forestry maintenance, which has led to more prevalent and dangerous wildfires.
Geopolitically, American leftists have been manipulated by our enemies. Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular positioned himself to become the go-to guy for oil and gas in Europe.
Because Putin has influenced environmentalist groups in America, those groups have barricaded domestic production of oil and made it so that Russian oil exports fetch higher prices.
Americans were still buying oil from Russia after its deplorable invasion of Ukraine and feeding Russia’s war machine. The anti-fossil fuel and anti-nuclear energy agendas have directly worked against America and our allies’ interests.
There has to be a balance struck between being good stewards of the environment and this radical, destructive agenda. America needs to be energy independent. Pushing taxpayer dollars toward fruitless, ineffective green initiatives is idiotic.
Perhaps the proper solution is human innovation to adapt to the ever-changing climate and, in the meantime, allow people to enjoy the benefits of cheap and efficient energy sources.
h/t Steve B.
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No-one has yet demonstrated that CO2 causes warming. Historically there has seldom been a link between high levels of CO2 and warmth, nor vice versa. The world once entered an ice age when the CO2 was 2500ppm.
I think we can all agree that the climate data clearly shows the earth has modestly warmed over the past 150 years. My impression is that there is no clear “consensus” among qualified climate scientists as to what percentage of that is man-made (CO2 forced). Our climate system is complex and there (still) are a number of variables we do not seem to fully understand. I think most HONEST climate scientists would agree with that. So, rather than VILIFYING energy producers, why not look to have an intelligent, fully informed & robust scientific debate on known climate parameters BEFORE we set policies that will essentially DISMANTLE our existing (reliable) energy system? You don’t make good decisions in a PANIC. How about we “throttle back” and start having an adult conversation about what is needed to formulate a sensible strategy if we reasonably conclude the climate is heating dangerously? As warranted, Is mitigation even feasible or is adaptation a better path forward? What realistic alternatives are available as we begin the DECADES long energy transition to come as fossil fuels are phased out? There is no EASY BUTTON (here) folks. To find the right answers, you need to start asking the RIGHT questions…
One fact about CO2 increases is that it’s effect is logarithmic in trapping heat and that the vast majority of the effect in warming has already occurred so a further doubling of CO2 will result in miniscule warming but will have the beneficial effects on the greening of the world as well as plants needing less water.