The Associated Press struggles mightily to avoid admitting that the Paris “climate conference” was a very expensive dystopian fantasy, in which world leaders soaked their taxpayers and also spewed vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere with their luxury jets, just to hold the world’s largest “Mad Max” live-action role-playing game:
If governments are serious about the global warming targets they adopted in Paris, scientists say they have two options: eliminating fossil fuels immediately or finding ways to undo their damage to the climate system in the future.
The first is politically impossible — the world is still hooked on using oil, coal and natural gas — which leaves the option of a major cleanup of the atmosphere later this century.
Yet the landmark Paris Agreement, adopted by 195 countries on Dec. 12, makes no reference to that, which has left some observers wondering whether politicians understand the implications of the goals they signed up for.
It’s great to be a left-wing movement with 100 percent support from the mainstream media, isn’t it?
Climate alarmists set goals that would require the immediate halt of all human industry as we know it, and the AP thinks it’s just “politically impossible” because the stupid, greedy, selfish proles of the word are still “hooked on using oil, coal, and natural gas.” The alarmists admit their true agenda would involve the primitivity of the industrialized world—but we’re the problem, because we’re too short-sighted to go along with it.
These political hacks wasted vast amounts of money to hold a meeting that established literally impossible goals to solve a “problem” no one can prove is happening, but the press refuses to smother them with the ridicule they richly deserve. The taxpaying citizens of every nation involved in the Paris conference should be absolutely livid about this extravagant waste of their resources—at least, those fortunate enough to live in nations where it’s still legal to express anger at the government and its weird climate-change state religion.
Those taxpaying citizens should also compare the impossible goals of Paris to the extravagant tribute that will be extracted from them by the Church of Global Warming and understand that all the sacrifices they’re expected to make, all the costs they’ll be forced to shoulder, are insignificant compared to what climate alarmists really think their crackpot computer models are telling them. The Little People are being bullied, cajoled, and often compelled to reduce their quality of life for what amounts to symbolic efforts against global warming.
Actual scientists have little use for symbolic effort, but climate change is about politics, not science.
Of course the politicians of Paris and their pet pseudo-scientists know their citizens would react with derision and horror if their actual goals were made public. Because this is a political process, those zero- and negative-emission targets are viewed as an opening bid, a cudgel of fear that can be used to beat skeptics into silence. The politicians will take whatever they can actually get and then demand more, time and again, because no matter what we give the Church of Global Warming, it will always be able to say we have not given enough to stave off the apocalypse.
Such a game plan is irrational to actual scientists, who see little point in demanding 1 percent of what is actually needed today and another 1 percent next year, ad infinitum. But it makes perfect sense to politicians! In fact, it’s just about the perfect model of creeping statism: A demand that can always be portrayed as breathlessly urgent, demanding immediate thoughtless compliance, but can never be completely fulfilled.
The AP article comes quite close to laying out the Paris game plan in those terms:
There are methods to achieve negative emissions today but they would need to be scaled up to a level that experts say could put climate efforts in conflict with other priorities, such as eradicating hunger. Still, if the Paris climate goals are to be achieved, there’s no way to avoid the issue, said Jan Minx of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate change in Berlin.
“My view is, let’s have this discussion,” he said. “Let’s involve ourselves in developing these technologies. We need to keep learning.”
The Paris Agreement was historic. For the first time all countries agreed to jointly fight climate change, primarily by reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
More sugar-coating for the insanity of the climate alarmists! What they truly want would do a lot more than merely “conflict” with priorities such as “eradicating hunger.” It would end human industry as we know it, given the current state of technology. Cars and airplanes would become impossible luxuries, reserved for the very rich and powerful, as would reliable electric power. The mass production of many items would be halted. Advanced economies would collapse into chaos. Feeding our own populations would become very expensive without carbon-emitting industrial agriculture, nevermind “eradicating hunger.”
Our media does us an enormous disservice by helping these climate lunatics pretend to be reasonable people with difficult demands. They want the end of the world as we know it, to prevent the end of the world as they imagine it. In fact, the AP concedes their goal is “so ambitious — some would say far-fetched, that there’s been very little research devoted to it. In Paris, politicians asked scientists to start studying how it can be done.”
Here are some of the ideas they’ve been coming up with:
The task would be enormous. One recent study said hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide would have to be removed in the second half of this century.
That has led some scientists to consider controversial geoengineering solutions like fertilizing the oceans with iron to make them absorb more carbon.
But the more viable methods being discussed today include planting more forests, which absorb carbon dioxide naturally as they grow, and combining bioenergy with carbon capture technologies.
Bioenergy comes from burning biological sources such as trees or crops. That results in zero net emissions, if the carbon dioxide released when one tree is burned is offset by the carbon dioxide absorbed when a new tree grows up.
However, if you also capture the emissions from the bioenergy plant and bury them underground, you are actually removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I’m old enough to remember when environmentalists thought deforestation was a major crisis. Instead, increased carbon levels have significantly “greened” the planet, and now they want to cut down all the trees and burn them in underground plants for electric power. Isn’t that what Saruman and his orcs were doing in “The Two Towers”—chopping down Treebeard’s friends and throwing them into underground pits to use as fuel for the Isingard war machine? That was J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of industrial hell, not a sustainable energy plan.
Does anyone think burning trees in this manner could provide the amount of electric power we’re currently obtaining from traditional sources, at anywhere near the low cost? “Carbon capture technology is very expensive. And then there’s the issue of finding places to store the carbon dioxide once you’ve captured it,” the AP admits.
The article goes on to note that many landowners might be reluctant to live atop pits where billions of tons of carbon are stored each year, not to mention the farmers who might not want to part with the millions of acres of farmland that would be required. So much for “eradicating hunger.” Even our current level of biofuel production is arguably making world hunger worse, and the fantasists of Paris envision boosting it by a thousand percent or more.
The other problem with these planet-engineering schemes is their potential to royally screw up the biosphere, if the climate alarmists are wrong (and they are). They’re declaring war on a beneficial component of the atmosphere, whose slightly elevated levels have no proven link to global warming, which is not demonstrably happening. Those CO2 levels do have a proven link to increased crop yields and more abundant forests. The politicized pseudo-science of climate change could very easily wind up spending trillions of our dollars to create an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
(Spoiler: the very same shiftless politicians who met in Paris would then demand we surrender even more of our money and freedom to them, so they could “fix” the problem they created. Rule Number One of Big Government: It will always attempt to use its power and wealth to create problems it can present itself as the solution to.)
Instead of freaking out and ruining the Earth in a counterproductive, but politically profitable, crusade to “save” it, we should aim for modest and realistic goals. We should keep using our industrial wealth to improve our technology, and wait for some real, indisputable evidence linking non-natural climate shifts to particular industrial systems.
There is a very good chance we will soon develop low- or zero-emission energy technologies at a reasonable pace and cost, such as nuclear fusion. Assuming madcap environmentalists don’t boycott those technologies to death, they will do far more to reduce the human footprint on our environment, in the latter half of the coming century, than anything the hucksters of Paris plan on forcing us to buy from their cronies today.
We should resolutely insist that climate alarmists be completely honest with the public about how much their expensive boondoggles would actually do to alleviate the Armageddon they are predicting. And, if the public makes a rational decision that the cost of such measures far outweighs their insignificant benefits, their judgment should be respected.
Of course, climate alarmists have no intention of giving the public a chance to exercise such judgment.
