In announcing the United State’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement last year, President Donald Trump declared, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
A company called RadicalMedia and Bloomberg Philanthropies attempted to counter the president this week with the release of a documentary titled “Paris to Pittsburgh” on the National Geographic Channel.
Taking incredible liberty with the facts and playing on fears and false hopes, the documentary casts a cataclysmic vision of extreme weather, blaming it on fossil energy all along the way.
This is a sad reminder of how ill-informed the national energy debate has become. It spreads alarmist propaganda and promotes a junk science proposition that the world would somehow be better off without fossil energy, while never disclosing how that same energy has made our world more climate resilient.
Worst of all, the film completely ignores the tragic continuation of energy poverty that myopic, renewable-centric policies inflict on the billions of humans on this planet.
They are being deprived of affordable electricity because environmental zealots advocate restricting new fossil energy projects in nations that simply cannot afford to electrify their nations at scale with anything else.
The movie also couldn’t be more ill-timed or poorly titled.
Invoking Paris as some kind of beacon of smart energy policy is beyond ironic — given that Paris is currently burning at the hands of working-class protesters opposed to climate change policies that intentionally increase fuel prices. (SEE ALSO: Yellow Vest Protests Spread Across EU, Leave Climate Activists Speechless)
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh’s Democratic mayor, in politically motivated sound bites, claims that Paris-like policies are the reason Pittsburgh has cleaned up its act. But the facts on the ground tell a very different story.
Pittsburgh is a beacon of how the environment can be cleaned up with fossil energy, not despite it.
Anyone who visited Pittsburgh decades ago can’t fail to note how much clearer its skies are now, and the data backs up that observation. But those gains did not come from myopic anti-fossil energy policies.
Quite the contrary, like many great American cities, Pittsburgh’s environment improved because of technology, not ideology.
Despite implications from the film, coal miners, oil and gas drillers, and steelworkers are still around in Pennsylvania. They are just doing their work cleaner and leaner than ever before.
The 90-percent reduction in air and water pollution in Pittsburgh occurred because we found a cleaner way to harness fossil energy through high-efficiency power plants and improved steel manufacturing technologies like Electric Arc Furnaces (EAFs).
One need only track the dramatic drop in air pollution across the country throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s to see that the deployment of these and other pollution control technologies brought about cleaner air, not some anti-fossil fuel ideology or marginal increase in renewable energy.
Aside from the irony of its title, the “Paris to Pittsburgh” film represents the worst kind of junk science and fear mongering.
The fundamental premise of the film is: unless the United States takes aggressive steps to reduce CO2 emissions, we’ll see disastrous impacts from sea level rise on the order of three, six, and even 20 feet. (SEE ALSO: Climatologist Counters Climate-Disaster Predictions With Sea-Level Report)
But once the real facts are disclosed, the film’s premise is ridiculous.
Here are the facts: If U.S. emissions were completely eliminated by 2020, the standard RCP4.5 model from the IPCC — which is deserving of criticism in its own right — predicts that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would be 2.1-percent lower in 2050.
An immediate shift to 100-percent renewable electricity (which is the primary topic of the film), even if it were achieved as soon as next year, would reduce 2050 CO2levels by a mere 0.7 percent.
So the climate zealots’ own data show that eliminating, let alone reducing emissions from the United States will contribute little to nothing to prevent the supposed catastrophic consequences the film uses as the call for the United States to stop using fossil fuels.
The sponsors of this film should spend less time playing games with climate science models and more time practicing basic math.
Meanwhile, the policies required to reduce CO2 emissions in any significant way would do real damage to this country and societies all over the world.
The latest IPCC report calls for carbon taxes that would increase fuel anywhere from $1.20 to as much as $49 per gallon by 2030.
Parisians are rioting over an increase of just 25 cents-per-gallon, imagine the potential for the chaos created by a $49 per gallon increase.
The energy cost explosion from these policies would cripple most economies, including our own.
Not to mention what life without access to reliable, abundant energy will continue to look like for billions of global citizens in the developing world who have bigger problems than feeling guilty about how they charge their iPhone.
Weather changes. Climate changes. The real story about weather and climate of the last 100 years is how incredibly resilient humans have become because of access to affordable and reliable fossil energy.
Pittsburgh and America have proven that you can harness fossil energy, make the building blocks of modern society, and clean the environment.
And, no, you don’t need billions of dollars in renewable subsidies to make it happen. You just need science, technology, and economic freedom.
That’s the foundation on which our country was built.
Mike Nasi is the executive director of Life: Powered, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and a partner at Jackson Walker LLP. Mike has 25 years of environmental and energy regulatory experience.
Read more at Daily Caller
Their having one about the Intelligence of Birds well Birds are smarter then Snowflakes because they leave the nest early soon are off on their own and start a family without any dumb collage courses and lessons from the Administrator Turkeys
Hi there New member..
Just found your website..
and with your interest in Arctic Volcanos, etc. wondered whether you might be interested in an apparent fairly new under water volcano at about 77 85N and 5 48 East, A couple of hundred miles WNW of Svalbard. (Looks to be right at the edge of the Molloy Ridge).
I have identified it by looking at the last 4 years of data on Nullschool Earth, using their data since 2014. It can be clearly seen to show the heat building in the area. It is now reaching 19.4C in the area. Areas 100 miles in each direction ate at the more expected levels of -1.8 to 3.0C.
I will leave a link to the Nullschool site here
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2019/01/06/0000Z/ocean/surface/currents/overlay=sea_surface_temp/stereographic=-53.34,91.36,2448/loc=5.513,77.947
There is also a further possibility to the SE of Svalbard showing on this graphical of the globe.
Cheers
“They are just doing their work leaner and cleaner” ???
The 90% reduction in air pollution was achieved through cleaner technology????
I was in Pittsburgh in 2017. At night, we went up the Duquesne Incline. I could not pick out a single steel mill on a clear night. I know what they look like, I worked in a steel mill for 30 years. Truth is, there is not one basic steel mill left within Pittsburgh’s city limits. Steel mills are energy intensive.
If some whack job NIMBY tells you that we can go 100% green energy, remember Pittsburgh .
America will become one big bedroom community.
Why does Nat-Geo still exist ?
because they’re an
” American Institution ” ?
NO
They’re an Un-American Institution
secretly run by Rockefeller and Bilderberg elite pigs
who are supposedly supremely….,.AMERICAN
Which they are not
These openly propose a
NEW….. WORLD …..,ORDER
I openly ask anybody to explain
HOW
The average USA citizen benefits from a
NEW …..WORLD…..ORDER…..??!
N.G. went totaly bonkers when it tried to to push off the Archoraptor and the missing link between birds and dinosours they tried to caim of the fake tribe in the Philapeans the Taskadea Tribe both turned out to be fakes and they still push this Darwinian poppycock
I just sent through a very eloquent, progressive CEO of an Oil and Gas company in Calgary Alberta. His message follows closely to this article – fossil fuels will be firmly in the mix by mid-century debunking the zero hydrocarbon myth, and technology and efficiency gains are going to be key. His name is Chris Slubicki and his company is leading edge in amazing technology and efficiency shifts.
And the Socialists would be very happy, reaping the rewards of Chris Slubicki’s efforts.