Climate Politics

Keep Your Head, Others are Losing Theirs Over Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Stossel’s interview with Bjorn Lomborg is featured in his article at Reason The Media’s Misleading Fearmongering Over Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

“Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”

United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry says it will take trillions of dollars to “solve” climate change. Then he says, “There is not enough money in any country in the world to actually solve this problem.”

Yes, they are projecting more than 100 Trillion US$.

Kerry has little understanding of money or how it’s created. He’s a multimillionaire because he married a rich woman. Now he wants to take more of your money to pretend to affect climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg points out that there are better things society should spend money on.

Lomberg acknowledges that a warmer climate brings problems. “As temperatures get higher, sea water, like everything else, expands. So we’re going to maybe see three feet of sea level rise. Then they say, ‘So everybody who lives within three feet of sea level, they’ll have to move!’ Well, no. If you actually look at what people do, they built dikes and so they don’t have to move.”

Rotterdam Adaptation Policy–Ninety years thriving behind dikes and dams.

People in Holland did that years ago. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level. In some areas, it’s 22 feet below. Yet the country thrives. That’s the way to deal with climate change: adjust to it.

“Fewer people are going to get flooded every year, despite the fact that you have much higher sea level rise. The total cost for Holland over the last half-century is about $10 billion,” says Lomberg. “Not nothing, but very little for an advanced economy over 50 years.”

For saying things like that, Lomberg is labeled “the devil.”

“The problem here is unmitigated scaremongering,” he replies. “A new survey shows that 60 percent of all people in rich countries now believe it’s likely or very likely that unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of mankind. This is what you get when you have constant fearmongering in the media.”

Some people now say they will not have children because they’re convinced that climate change will destroy the world. Lomborg points out how counterproductive that would be: “We need your kids to make sure the future is better.”

He acknowledges that climate warming will kill people.

“As temperatures go up, we’re likely to see more people die from heat. That’s absolutely true. You hear this all the time. But what is underreported is the fact that nine times as many people die from cold…. As temperatures go up, you’re going to see fewer people die from cold. Over the last 20 years, because of temperature rises, we have seen about 116,000 more people die from heat. But 283,000 fewer people die from cold.”

A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Source: The Lancet

That’s rarely reported in the news.

When the media doesn’t fret over deaths from heat,
they grab at other possible threats.

CNN claims, “Climate Change is Fueling Extremism.”

The BBC says, “A Shifting Climate is Catalysing Infectious Disease.“

U.S. News and World Report says, “Climate Change will Harm Children’s Mental Health.”

Lomborg replies, “It’s very, very easy to make this argument that everything is caused by climate change if you don’t have the full picture.”

He points out that we rarely hear about positive effects of climate change, like global greening.

Spatial pattern of trends in Gross Primary Production (1982- 2015). Source: Sun et al. 2018.

 

“That’s good! We get more green stuff on the planet. My argument is not that climate change is great or overall positive. It’s simply that, just like every other thing, it has pluses and minuses…. Only reporting on the minuses, and only emphasizing worst-case outcomes, is not a good way to inform people.”

Synopsis of Lomborg’s Policy Recommendation (excerpted transcription)

If you’re a politician and you look at ten different problems, you’re natural inclination is to say, “Let’s give 1/10 to each one of them.” And economists would tend to say, “No, let’s give all of the money to the most efficient problem first and then to the second most efficient problem, and so on. I’m simply suggesting there’s a way that we could do much better with much less.

Of course if you feel very strongly about your particular area, when I come and say, “Actually, this is not a very efficient use of resources.” I get why people get upset. But for our collective good, for all the stuff that we do on the planet, we actually need to consider carefully where do we spend money well, compared to where do we just spend money and feel virtuous about ourselves.

If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate, not only
are we not fixing climate, but we’re also wasting an enormous amount
of money that could have been spent on all these other things.

I’m simply trying to make that simple point, and I think most people kind of get that.  Remember, electricity is about a fifth of our total energy consumption. So, all everybody’s talking about is all the electricity, which is the easiest thing to switch over. But we don’t know anything about how we’re going to, know very, very little about how we’re going to deal with the other 4/5. This is energy that we use on things that are very, very hard to replace. So it’s a fertilizer that keeps 4 billion people alive. Making the fertilizer. It’s steel, cement, it’s industrial processes. Most of heating we use comes from fossil fuels, most transportation, that’s fossil fuels.

Know that if the U.S. went entirely net zero today and stayed that way for the rest of the century, consider how incredibly extreme this would be. First of all, you would not be able to feed everyone in the U.S. The whole economy would break down. You wouldn’t know how to get transportation. A lot of people would freeze. Some people would fry. There would be lots and lots of problems. But even if you did this and managed to do it, the net impact, if you run it through the U.N. climate model, is that you would reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit. We would almost not be able to measure it by the end of the century. It would have virtually no impact.

Look, again, we’re rich and so a lot of people feel like you can spend money on many different things. And that’s true. I’m making the argument that for fairly little money, we could do amazing good. If we spent $35 billion, not a trillion dollars, just $35 billion, which is not nothing. I don’t think, neither you or I have that amount of money. But, you know, in the big scheme of things, this is a rounding error. $35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world, each and every year and make the poor world $1.1 trillion richer.

I think we have a moral responsibility to remember, that there are lots and lots of people, so mostly about 6 billion people out there, who don’t have this luxury of being able to think 100 years ahead and think about a little bit of a fraction of a degree, who wants to make sure that their kids are safe.
And so, the next money we spend should probably be on these very simple and cheap policies.

 

COP28 Optics: Deal to “Transition Away” not “Phase Out” Fossil Fuels

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Once again equivocation rules climatists.  After the uproar over demands to “phase out” hydrocarbon fuel, the wording was changed to say “transition away.”  Thus the divide is papered over while alarmists claim agreement was reached to “leave it in the ground.”  Others will point to language such as “transition away in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”  Just like Paris COP, everyone pledges and celebrates as though something has changed

David Blackmon explains the wordplay in his Forbes article COP28 Offers ‘Transition Away’ From Fossil Fuels But No ‘Phaseout’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

COP28 just concluded feverish negotiations in its final hours—actually, beyond its scheduled final hours—with the announcement of a final agreement Wednesday that includes language committing its near-200 participating nations to “transition away from” fossil fuels. That is the language negotiators landed upon to replace the previous language pledging to “phase out” the use of coal, oil and natural gas across the coming decades preferred by energy transition boosters.

Many observers are no doubt left wondering what the real difference is between the two phrases, other than that the “transition away from” language was found to be less offensive to big producers and users of these energy resources than a phasing-out turned out to be. It isn’t a bad question, to be sure.

Advocates for this final language claim it is “historic” in that it is the first time any of the 28 UN Conference of the Parties climate summits have overtly mentioned moving away from the use of fossil fuels in a final agreement. But it is fair to note that countries across the globe have invested many trillions of dollars—much of it funded by costly debt—in efforts to “transition away from” fossil fuels over the last three decades now and little has changed. The world still gets roughly 80% of its primary energy from coal, oil and natural gas, only a sliver less than it did at the turn of the century. The world will use record volumes of all three fossil fuels in 2023, and most experts project it will do so again in 2024 and beyond.

So, while this language may well be “historic,” it is also merely a restatement of commitments many of the signatory governments have already embarked upon for years and failed to achieve. Honestly, it is difficult to envision how what amounts to yet another COP-generated word salad will do anything to change the undeniable global dynamic.

Reuters quotes Anne Rasmussen, lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, assessing the language as uninspiring. “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really need is an exponential step change in our actions,” she said.

But COP conferences involving more than 190 participating countries with widely disparate economic and energy security priorities and 70,000+ attendees are not really designed to produce exponential step changes, are they? COP rules requiring unanimous consent to all language included in each subsequent final agreement ensure that commitments will inevitably be watered down with qualifying language designed to enable each country to act upon its own unique interpretation of what phrases like “transition away from” actually mean.

Those are bold words, but everyone should recognize that “real-economy outcomes” in, say, Peru or Uganda are likely to look entirely different than those in Belgium or Canada. The same is likely true of the respective outcomes we will see in the coming years in India as compared to the United States.

The Bottom Line

As an example: If China wished to signify a zeal to “transition away from” its own massive use of fossil fuels, it might decide to cancel its new program going into effect January 1, 2024, which will subsidize the building of hundreds more coal-fired power plants. Does anyone involved in COP28 expect that or any similar action by the Xi Jinping government as a result of its signing off on this agreement? Of course not. Beijing will interpret the phrase “transition away from” as it sees fit and continue to prioritize its national energy security over any climate commitments.

At the end of the day, this final agreement from COP28 seems destined to be remembered in the same vein as all previous COPs other than COP3 (Kyoto) and COP21 (Paris) are remembered—as, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, a lot of sound and fury signifying not much at all.

Footnote:  Let the Blame Games Go Onto Steroids.

 

COP28 Showcases Globalist Agenda 2030

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Kit Knightly writes at off-guardian COP28: The Globalist Agenda Has Never Been More Obvious.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T Tyler Durden

As of this morning, we are four days into the two-week climate change summit in Dubai.

Yes, as we can all note for the thousandth time, literal fleets of private jets have descended on the desert so that bankers and billionaires can talk about making sure we don’t drive anymore or eat too much cheese.

What’s on the agenda? Globalism – and it’s never been more obvious.

President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva essentially said as much:

The planet is fed up with unfulfilled climate agreements. Governments cannot escape their responsibilities. No country will solve its problems alone. We are all obliged to act together beyond our borders,”

Thursday’s opening remarks were predictably doom-laden, with His Royal Highness Charles III and UN Secretary-General António Guterres falling into a traditional good cop/bad cop hustle.

Charlie warned that we are embarking on a “vast, frightening experiment”, asking “how dangerous are we actually prepared to make our world?”

While Tony offered just the barest, thinnest slice of hope to world leaders:

It is not too late […] You can prevent planetary crash and burn. We have the technologies to avoid the worst of climate chaos – if we act now.”

The rest of the two weeks will doubtless be committed to lobbyists, bankers, royals and politicians deciding exactly how they are going to “act”. Or, more accurately, how they are going to sell their pre-agreed actions to their cattle-like populations.

They are literally telling us their plans, all we have to do is listen.

For example, Friday and Saturday were given over to the “World Climate Action Summit”, at which over 170 world leaders pledged support for Agenda 2030.

Among the agreements and pledges signed at the summit so far is the “Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action”. Which, according to the BBC, pledges to:

take aim at planet-warming food”

We’ve all played this game long enough to know what that means, haven’t we?  It means no more meat and dairy, and a lot more bugs and GMO soy cubes.

They never say that, of course. Instead, they just use phrases like “orient policies [to] reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, or “shifting from higher greenhouse gas-emitting practices to more sustainable production and consumption approaches.”  Maintaining plausible deniability via vague language is part of the dance, but anyone paying attention knows exactly what they are talking about.

It doesn’t stop there. World leaders have also agreed to establish a “loss and damage fund”, a 430 million dollar resource for developing countries that need to “recover” after being “damaged” by climate change.

Ajay Banga, head of noted charitable organisation the World Bank, is all in favour of the idea and will be supporting the plan by agreeing to “pause” debt repayments from any government impacted by climate change.

Yes, those are trillions of US$ they are projecting.

We know how this works, we saw the same thing in the IHR amendments following Covid – it’s a bribe pool. One that serves to both further the narrative of climate change and instruct policy in the third world. Any developing nation’s government that wants a slice of that pie will have to publicly talk about all the negative impacts climate change has on their country.  At the same time, to get the money, they will almost certainly have to agree to “adopt climate-friendly policies” and/or submit their climate policies to an “independent panel of experts” appointed by the UN.

Alongside the food pledge and loss fund, we have the Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge, which aims to increase reliance on “green energy”. Over 120 countries signed that one.

And then there’s the Global Methane Pledge, which has been signed by 155 governments as well as 50 oil companies.  These companies represent around half the world’s oil production, and just want to help the planet, they have no financial stake in this situation at all.

There’s the smaller Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace, which was signed by only 70 countries (and 39 NGOs). That one emphasizes the link between war and carbon emissions and aims to “boost financial support for climate resilience in war-torn and fragile settings”, whatever that means in real terms I’m not sure.

And, of course, 124 countries (including the EU and China) have signed the inevitable ‘Declaration on Climate and Health’.

It is funded to the tune of 1 BILLION dollars from donors such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and supposedly aims to:

better leverage synergies at the intersection of climate change and health to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of finance flows.”

…which might be the worst sentence anyone has ever written.

All this is going to culminate in what they call the “Global Stocktake”. Essentially this is a mid-term report for the Paris Agreements, which can be “leveraged to accelerate ambition in their next round of climate action plans due in 2025”.

Whatever “leveraged to accelerate ambition” turns out to mean, you can be sure all of the attending governments will happily comply.  That includes every government in NATO, the European Union and BRICS by the way.  That includes the USA and China. That includes Russia and Ukraine.  That includes Israel…and Palestine.

It’s basically covid all over again.

♦   We know, just like Covid, the official narrative of climate change is a lie.

♦   We know, just like Covid, climate change is being used as an excuse to usher in massive social control and global governance.

♦   And we know, just like Covid, almost every world government on both sides of every divide is backing it.

Even if they don’t always agree, even if they are happy to kill each other’s citizens in large numbers, they are all on board the same globalist gravy train, all going in the same direction to the same destination, and it has never been more obvious.

COP28 Mind-Boggling Numbers

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The Green Mirage recedes as you approach it.

Robert Lyman exposes the freakish math swirling around Dubai COP this fortnight in his Financial Post article COP28 by the (very big) numbers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This weekend’s climate meeting will discuss trillions of dollars.
No one will mention its chance of success is zero.

Neuroscience tells us the human brain is very bad at interpreting large numbers. Most people know that million, billion and trillion are all big numbers but can’t really understand what the difference between them is. Answer: it’s big. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years, which is a lot more than 12 days.

Our cognitive difficulties with large numbers will be a problem when reading the news from the COP28 climate conference that convenes in Dubai on Thursday.

The conference has a wide-ranging agenda. It also will be attended by a large number of people — over 70,000 at last count. There’s the first large-number problem for COP28. How does a group of 70,000 people possibly discuss anything in a coherent way?

The organizers have identified five themes on which they would like to see agreement among the almost 190 governments that will be represented. When you’re talking governments, 190 is yet another brain-challenging number.

To oversimplify, there are four main themes:

♦  how to accelerate all countries’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so as to meet a proposed 2050 “net-zero” target (zero not being a large number);
♦  how to induce wealthier countries to give much more money to poorer countries to help them both mitigate and adapt to climate change;
♦  how to persuade all countries to phase out production of fossil fuels by 2050; and, finally,
♦  how to increase the UN’s role as central coordinator and global regulator of climate efforts.

Most discussions behind closed doors will be about money. Rich countries are now paying about US$70 billion in climate aid, mostly to help finance GHG emissions reduction. The developing countries want this raised to at least US$1.4 trillion per year by 2026, 20 times higher. Twenty is not actually that large a number, except when talking about multiplying already very big dollar amounts by it. Developing countries have also demanded that funding for adaptation rise to at least US$600 billion per year. At last year’s COP27 in Egypt, they got agreement in principle for a new fund to pay for the “loss and damages” they will incur from adverse weather events they attribute to the historic GHG emissions of the industrialized countries, though no dollar amounts were agreed to. Finally, developing countries are pushing for a new Global Biodiversity Fund, to which developed countries would donate a mere US$20 billion per year.

Round numbers: rich countries would be on the hook for US$2 trillion per year. If allocations were based on GDP, Canada would owe three per cent of the total — or US$60 billion per year. In Canadian dollars, that’s roughly 78 billion CAN$. There are about 16 million households in Canada so (do the math) each household would owe $4,875. Per year. That’s a number the average person can easily understand. He or she can also understand there is absolutely no way the Canadian public or voters in any other OECD country would ever agree to such a thing. Not even if they didn’t know (but they do) that China, producer of 30 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions, not only would not be contributing but might well qualify as a recipient.

The previous 27 COPs (for Conference of the Parties) have all promoted ever-more ambitious emissions reductions. But since the first COP global emissions have risen 60 per cent, driven by developing countries’ relentless efforts to achieve more economic development for their burgeoning populations. There is no evidence that trend will change. China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and others all see fossil fuel production as key to their economic development and energy security. They are unlikely to commit to production declines even if a few OECD countries do.

The United Nations secretariat will lobby hard at COP28 to expand the role of existing institutions, including even more climate summits to place even more political pressure on leaders, and they may succeed in this (though many of us feel just one a year is already more than enough). How difficult can it be to convince tens of thousands of climate stakeholders to travel to exotic conference locales each year? Especially if the general public cannot grasp the numbers they’re playing with.

Yes, those are trillions of dollars in the projection.

This weekend the media in general will report in glowing terms on the energy and enthusiasm of conference participants, especially those representing environmental NGOs. The communiqué will note every new commitment made yet entirely ignore that the probability the entire process will meet its objectives is a very, very small number not significantly different from zero.

 

 

 

Trudeau Climate Crusade Hits Alberta Wall

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tyler Durden has the story at zerohedge Alberta Premier Defies Trudeau Carbon Agenda – Invokes Sovereignty Act.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It is an action which multiple red states in the US undertaken: Blocking carbon controls ingrained in “green power” initiatives conjured by the federal government.

Now it appears the momentum has spread to Canada through Alberta’s conservative leadership as Premier Danielle Smith defies the Trudeau regime by invoking the province’s recently drafted Sovereignty Act.

The Sovereignty Act is designed to give Alberta’s legislative assembly the power to identify any federal programs or actions that violate Alberta’s constitution, the government would then refuse to implement those programs.  The implementation of the act means that finally, an open dialogue on the existential threat of the UN’s “sustainable development goals” and Agenda 2030 has begun in Canada.  

The reasons for opposition to “Net Zero” objectives have been repeated over and over again by political critics, economic critics and scientific critics alike. 

1.  Net zero as the UN defines it is impossible using existing green technologies with inefficient and costly power generation.

2.  Net zero proponents refuse in most cases to acknowledge the usefulness of nuclear power as a means to reduce reliance on oil and gas.

3.  Net zero would require perpetual authoritarian oversight of individual carbon emissions and probably population reduction in the near term.

4.  None of the above even matters because there’s no concrete evidence whatsoever man-made carbon causes global warming.

In other words, the supposed crisis is a fraud and there’s no reason
for any nation, province or state to sacrifice their power grids.

Beyond the big con, stagflation has made carbon controls economically impossible. Aggressive price spikes since 2020 make gas, oil and coal more important than ever in maintaining basic services for the populace along with the needs of industry. Reducing available supply in the face of desperate demand would only fuel the fires of inflation further. Even Europe has been reverting back to “villainous” energy sources like coal to keep things running.

When people face the possibility of freezing or starving there is little chance they are going to listen to unfounded claims of climate doomsday from a bunch of ultra-rich yacht sailing private jet-setting carbon-spewing hypocrite elites.

See Also Hydrocarbons Are the Greenest Fuels

 

Assessing Risk and Climate Science (Quora Discussion)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Excerpted below is a Quora discussion with illuminating commentary from  Aaron Brown, former asset risk manager. AB responds to Topic Question and related comments, text in italics with my bolds and added images.

Quora? What will make conservatives accept climate change as real science?

AB: There are scientists who study cloud formation, ocean currents, rainfall patterns and other aspects of climate. Some are good, some not so much. Most people, liberal or conservative, accept that much of this is science.

Then there are scientists who build climate models and make predictions about things like global average temperature from 2081 to 2100 under different assumptions about human emissions and other factors. The people doing this work are considered scientists, but the conclusions are not science in the sense of empirically verifiable facts or consensus theories with strong empirical confirmation.

It’s a semantic game whether you call the conclusions “science” or not, but either way they are not as certain as scientific laws about gravity or momentum. People who like the predictions will embrace them, people who don’t like the predictions will resist them.

Liberals tend to be open to new ideas, conservatives tend to be more skeptical. That means many liberals are more willing to take strong action based on model predictions than are most conservatives. Skeptics tend to accept models if they make useful, non-obvious predictions that turn out to be true. Unfortunately it will take at least a century to gather that kind of evidence for climate models.

One possible breakthrough would be improvements in forecasting weather. You can prove a weather model in months rather than decades or centuries. But the fundamental claim of climate science is that it’s easier to predict global decadal averages in fifty years than next month’s weather in New York’s Central Park. That kind of claim—”I can’t predict the stuff you can check but trust me on stuff you can’t check”—makes skeptics skeptical.

A more likely breakthrough would be the the people making climate predictions proving their modeling ability by making useful, non-obvious predictions in other fields that can be validated. So far we have not seen this—successful modelers in other fields moving to climate science, or climate modelers proving success in other fields. This is a major point of skepticism for skeptics.

Finally, many conservatives are skeptical due to the big money involved in climate change combined with intense government interest and possibilities for vast wealth from subsidies and other programs. This is called Big Science and it’s often been dead wrong in the past, not to mention occasionally threatening all life on Earth. There are some successes of Big Science as well but skeptics will note the temptation to skew climate science for money or to push policies the advocates wanted before any climate support showed up.

None of this is relevant for policy decisions. If we somehow knew for certain today what the global mean temperature would be from 2081 – 2100, it wouldn’t tell us whether it was a good idea to ban coal or impose a carbon tax today. Conservatives are apt to assume any legislation will be written by lobbyists paid by cronies and empire-building bureaucrats rather than any kind of scientist. The laws will have unintended consequences, and send the economy and technology down unpredictable novel paths. We can’t estimate the effect on the human environmental footprint, we have only limited ability to relate the human environmental footprint to climate, and even less to relate climate to human welfare.

In such circumstances, the conservative inclination is to wait until you’re sure you’re helping things before spending a lot of money and writing a bunch of rules. The liberal tendency is to use your best judgement today, and expand the stuff that works tomorrow, while fixing or abandoning the stuff that doesn’t. This choice has nothing to do with climate science.

Comment: A model is just a theory put into numbers.

AB: Agreed, but the problem is lack of data. You can’t check 80 year in the future predictions with 30 years of data; and the global climate is so complex you need far more data even than we have with current measurements.

The data from more than 150 years or so is local data averaged over centuries or longer, useless for predicting global shorter-term data. Prior to 1990 we have very noisy data that is broader and available daily or sometimes even more often, but only since 1990 do we have anything like reliable, consistent global data.

People do calibrate their models to be consistent with the past, sometimes with more success than others. But there are so many parameters to global climate that this is not a useful check.

Comment: The required accuracy of your data and models grows exponentially with the amount of time you are predicting. It’s practically impossible to improve weather models beyond a certain point, so it’s not fair to consider this a failing of climate science.

AB: This is the central claim of climate science, but it remains unproven. Chaotic systems are not inherently unpredictable—for example the multibody solar system—and three or more bodies under gravity are chaotic—appears to have remained stable and pretty easy to predict for billions of years.

Attempts to predict weather in the most straightforward way, breaking the atmosphere down into small parts and applying rules of physics, have not succeeded in precise or long-range predictions—but there clearly are weather patterns that repeat often enough they must have some explanation. Modern weather prediction relies mainly on observed regularities without firm theoretic explanations.

You may be right that weather prediction will always be intractable, but perhaps some out-of-the-box idea will change that. If it did, we’d probably understand a lot more about climate.

It’s not obvious that long-term averages are more stable and predictable than shorter-term ones. In the stock market, for example, prices are pretty close to a random walk and uncertainty increases pretty steadily with the square root of time interval.

If you look at actual temperature measurements over local areas or global, over time scales from days to millions of years, uncertainty seems to increase with time, but slower than the square root. The unit of most certainty seems to be a year—predicting the average temperature over the next year has less uncertainty than predicting tomorrow’s temperature, but also less uncertainty than predicting the average temperature over the next decade or century.

Trajectories of a double pendulum. The simple predictable behavior of a pendulum appears chaotic when a second pendulum is attached. How many factors interact in our climate system?

This is a pure statistical observation, ignoring all climate science. The claim of climate science is models that incorporate things like solar variation, volcanoes, human emissions and so forth can make long-range averages less uncertain than annual averages. But we’ll need a lot of examples of long-range predictions—centuries of data—to confirm that directly, without resorting to climate theory; meaning that’s unlikely to convince skeptics in this century.

Of course you’re right that there seem to be physical limits that cause climate to move in cycles rather than drifting off to entirely new regimes—but regimes do change, and on planets other than Earth perhaps to extremes like losing the atmosphere.

Long exposure of double pendulum exhibiting chaotic motion (tracked with an LED)

But conservation of energy, for example, does not necessarily impose a constraint. There are many ways for energy to be removed from or added to global temperatures. It’s not necessarily true that, say, reducing incoming solar radiation cools the planet. In a simple system, reducing heat input lowers temperature. But in a complex system you could touch off any number of positive and negative feedback effects that could lead to any outcome.

Comment: I think this group is under valuing the large amount of research that has been predicting increases in global temperatures and the effects it will cause. There is ample data on the rate of increase in green house gases [CO2 and Methane] caused by humans lately.

AB: Are you saying that the predictions will convince skeptics? I disagree for several reasons.

1. There have been many predictions, many of which were spectacularly wrong, none of which were spectacularly right. The more catastrophic the prediction, the more often it turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Now you can go back after-the-fact and say the people making the worst predictions were nuts and other people made predictions that were not spectacularly wrong, but skeptics will find this unconvincing—like someone sifting through horoscope predictions to find some that seemed to come true.

2. The more sober predictions have merely been extrapolations of the recent past, too obvious to convince skeptics. Every time anything happens lots of people claim to have predicted it, and that it will continue in the future until disaster. Skeptics think that if temperatures started falling tomorrow, the predictions would quickly shift to predicting global cooling.

3.  Yes, atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up, and those could cause temperature increases, and humans are emitting CO2, and there’s no other obvious explanation for the increases in CO2. But those are simple observations. To convince skeptics of your explanations and predictions, you have to do more. If temperature increases tracked CO2 increases—rather than CO2 going up steadily and temperature bouncing up and down with more down months than up months—but an overall increase, the connection is not obvious.

4. Videos like the one you posted that tell us what things will be like decades in the future, something we cannot check, will not convince skeptics.

I think I outlined the main things likely to convince skeptics in my answer.

Comment: Many of the inter related factors determining climate have non linear relationships so modeling is extremely challenging and in order to produce sensible sounding outputs, tuning software is used to produce an answer deemed politically correct. If funding agencies would ban the use of tuning software the model funding would soon stop because of the self evident garbage answers.

AB: I agree and would go even further. I think climate is chaotic, and cannot be usefully modeled.

Everyone agrees that weather is chaotic, so only tentative short-term predictions are useful. But the defining claim of climate science is that if you average parameters like temperature over the entire globe over 20-year periods, it becomes predictable.

But if you check that assumption by comparing the standard deviation of temperature changes over larger regions and longer periods, you see it hits a minimum at single locations over one year. You can predict the average temperature in Central Park over the next year more accurately than tomorrow’s average temperature over New York State, or 20-years’ average temperature in Central Park.

It’s possible that casual models driven entirely by physics could surmount that issue, but so far these have been entirely unsuccessful without statistical tuning—tuning that does not improve ability for future predictions. Moreover you would expect such a model to predict weather better than climate, and no models can do that—they can only claim successful predictions over periods too long for practical testing.

That doesn’t mean climate models are worthless, but they are less reliable than weather reports, not more reliable.

Comment: In the case of climate, it’s the case that a large chunk of conservatives are still conservationists, who don’t get counted as environmentalists because of the heavy left (Marxist, even) bent of the green movement over the last several decades. Why not appeal to this perspective?

AB: I think you’re focusing on the wrong issue. You don’t have to convince anyone that protecting the environment is important, you have to convince them you have a plan that will do more good than harm.

Nuclear power is a great example. It reduces CO2, but also other forms of pollution. It doesn’t require decades and trillions of dollars to build a new power-grid infrastructure, it’s plug-and-play with the existing system (almost, anyway). The technology is well-understood, safe and efficient. You won’t find opposition from conservatives, only from some liberals.

Several MEPs (mainly Greens) hold up anti-nuclear posters at the debate.

But other tactics will require more argument. A carbon tax, for example, would send technology and the economy down an entirely new path, with entirely unpredictable consequences. It would seem to increase uncertainty about future climate rather than decrease it. It has other issues as well. To gain support for one from skeptics, you’ll have to convince them that you can predict the effects of such a tax on human welfare in 2100 well enough to make it a good bet.

Geoengineering is the cheapest and surest way to reduce global temperatures, but it controversial on both left and right for its possible unintended consequences. Here you have to convince people the gain is worth the risk.

The single best no-brainer solution is to work for world peace and cooperation. War is the biggest threat to the environment and climate. Solutions to climate change and dozens of equally consequential global issues will require cooperation—or at least less conflict—among nations. Redirecting military spending to climate research and mitigation would do tremendous good. Best of all, world peace and global cooperation have many direct advantages, not just vastly improving our ability to respond rationally to issues like climate change.

Self Imposed Energy Poverty Coming to Canada

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jock Finlayson describes how climate change policies are depleting Canadians’ financial means in his article Millions of Canadians May Face ‘Energy Poverty’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The term “energy poverty” is not yet part of day-to-day political debate in Canada, but that’s likely to change in the next few years. In Europe, the high and rising cost of energy has become a political lightning rod in several countries including Britain and France. Something similar may be in store for Canada.

The Trudeau government and some of the provinces are
aggressively pursuing the holy grail of decarbonization.

To achieve this, they’re engineering dramatic increases in carbon and other taxes on fossil fuels and promising to pour vast sums of money into building new electricity generation and transmission infrastructure to help reduce reliance on oil, refined petroleum products, natural gas and coal. Both strategies point to higher energy costs.

Tax advocates say it is a small % of GDP. But it is still $10 Billion extracted from Canadian households

The Trudeau government has legislated a national minimum carbon tax set to reach $170 per tonne of emissions by 2030, up from $50 in 2022 and $65 currently. Ottawa has also imposed a “clean fuel standard” that will further raise the cost of fuel. These policies are driven by concerns over climate change, which is a risk, to be sure, but so is the prospect of rapidly escalating energy prices for Canadian households and businesses.

Energy poverty arises when households and families must devote a significant fraction of their after-tax income to cover the cost of energy used for transportation, home heating and cooking, and the provision of electricity. In 2022, the United Kingdom government estimated that 13.4 percent of households were in energy poverty, which it defined as needing to spend more than 10 percent of income to cover the cost of directly consumed energy.

There’s no single agreed methodology for assessing the prevalence of energy poverty. A recent Canadian study reports that in 2017, between 6 percent and 19 percent of Canadian households experienced some form of energy poverty, with an above-average incidence in rural areas, Atlantic Canada and among people living in older single-family homes. If accurate, this finding suggests that many more Canadians will soon become acquainted with the term as taxes on fossil fuels climb and governments impose new regulations affecting the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles, industrial equipment, appliances and agricultural operations.

Canada is blessed with plentiful and diverse supplies of energy. Over time, we have become an important global producer and exporter of energy, with oil, natural gas and electricity together expected to account for one-quarter of Canada’s merchandise exports in 2023. Canada is also an intensive consumer of energy, in part because of our cold climate, dispersed population and relatively high living standards.

80% of the Other Renewables is solid biomass (wood), which leaves at most 1% of Canadian total energy supply coming from wind and solar.

End-use energy demand in Canada is around 13,000 petajoules. Of this, industry is responsible for about half, followed by transportation, residential buildings, commercial buildings and agriculture. Refined petroleum products—all based on oil—are the largest fuel type consumed in Canada (around 40 percent of the total), followed by natural gas (36 percent) and electricity (16 percent). Biofuels and other smaller sources comprise the rest. These data underscore Canadians’ overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels to meet their energy needs.

Politicians in a hurry to slash greenhouse gas emissions via higher taxes
and more regulations must be alert to the risk that millions of Canadians
could find themselves in energy poverty by the end of the decade.

Jock Finlayson is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute.

See Also Canada Budget Officer Quashes Climate Alarm

 

Kansas Shows the Way to Energy Freedom

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Posted at Master Resource is a most encouraging development by the Kansas legislature.  The article is Kansas Energy Freedom Now! The whole story is uplifting and I will only repeat here comments on what Kansas resolved and how nearly unanimous support was achieved. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Carrie Barth (R-Kansas, District 5) and Dennis Hedke, unapologetic supporter of the U.S. Constitution, acclaimed author of The Audacity of Freedom (2011), geophysicist, and former member Kansas House of Representatives (former Chair of the House Energy Committee), have drafted a clean and accurate Resolution for the Republican Party. This passed with overwhelming support. It appears to acknowledge that wind is not a good corporate citizen.

Representative Barth in an email:

Our Constitution of the United States gives the power to the people and states, not a dictator movement to control people. The “Green Agenda” is a joke. What they call green energy of wind and solar is anything but green other than it takes a lot of money to mine, build and construct, maintenance for the units, along with remediation when blades break off and the turbines catch on fire. It takes more green money from there to then build transmission lines that take people’s green land when eminent domain is used. Then people see transmission line tariffs on their energy bills. Oh, and wait, your rates never go down even though the energy industry tells you how cost effective it is.

I would refer to wind and solar as “brown or black energy”. They are unreliable and cause brownouts and blackouts. This hurts people, it hurts businesses, and even the ground under them turns brown.

Excerpts from the Resolution follow:

  • CO2 is not a dangerous gas, nor a pollutant, to be avoided and scare mongered.
  • The Kansas Republican Party Platform opposes efforts to force communities to engage in sustainable development guidance from the federal government or the United Nations, which are actively attacking our local communities in an effort to implement the Paris Climate Agreement
  • Kansas is not to be victimized by lobbyists guiding KS into blackouts and profiteering from subsidies, and alliances with the UN Global Agenda
  • Kansas (Republican Party) supports alternative energy, while continuing to support oil and gas reserves within the State
  • Kansas will prefer reliable and affordable energy above all
  • Kansas (Republican Party)  will reject the “UN Agenda 2030 “Sustainable Development Goals” to guide their investments in Kansas, even rewarding executives and directors with additional bonuses and stock options for implementing the global climate plan”
  • Kansas (Republican Party) will reject energy projects that are obvious land grabs, funding foreign companies with taxpayer-funded grants and tying up valuable Kansas farmland for decades with projects that no company is ultimately held responsible for decommissioning at the end of their useful lives, even violating property rights of farmers affected by the projects
  • Kansas (Republican Party) opposes so called Cap and Trade schemes

The resolution concludes:

Whereas irrefutable evidence demonstrates that ill-health effects to mankind and the environment are occurring due to the side effects of industrial scale wind installations. These occurrences are widespread, wherever these installations have been constructed;

Therefore, be it resolved, the Republican Party of Kansas, in view of the preponderance of evidence, will support candidates and legislative intent regarding energy policy that will serve to provide protection to our citizens security, physical health, financial health, access to reliable energy and property rights across all Kansas counties.

Master Resource Comment

This is the first time we have seen a legislative body, organize, and nearly 100% agree, that climate change, which it always does and has done, should not be a driver for energy policy. It is the first time we have seen in such a document, a clear rejection of industrial wind and solar profiteers, and references to the irrefutable evidence of harm to the environment, people, and a clear intention to go forward with reliable, responsible, and cost-effective energy policy, while respecting property rights.

Question:

A lot of readers will be wondering how you and Rep Barth achieved a 180-1 vote for this very clear resolution. Given that KS has a pro wind record of placing wind factories in the State, even with a Republican House and Senate, is there a catalyst for this resolution at this time and at this place? Was a lot of lobbying needed, or was this more evolutionary, organic in nature due to the fast paced media pieces on changing perspectives of “renewables and climate”?

Answer: Former Chair, Dennis Hedke:

I perceive much of the reason for the success was due to the fact that the Committee reviewing the Resolution is heavily conservative. They had to present it to the Republican Party Delegates, which are probably also more conservative leaning.

The Legislators, Carrie excluded, are a lot more squishy, caring more about holding on to their seats, than acting with resolve and principle.  There may be some renewed pressure on Legislators to resist the absolutely ridiculous reasons for being ‘green’. That remains to be seen. Many of them simply forget that “The Truth Will Set You Free”.

I forgot to answer your question about cost of electricity. My bills range from about .13/kwh to .14/kwh. Prices have increased by about 55% since wind power has been replacing coal and natural gas, commencing around 2011.

Climate Health Crisis Meme Goes Viral

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The comingling of climate and covid fears and policies is currently ramping up to warp speed across all propaganda platforms.  Kit Knightly explains the shock and awe agenda by media and governments to corral the public into submission.  His Off-Guardian article is Why are the globalists calling “Climate Change” a “Public Health Crisis”? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T Tyler Durden

The answer is all to do with the pandemic treaty and climate lockdowns.

The global elite plan to introduce a near-permanent “global state of emergency” by re-branding climate change as a “public health crisis” that is “worse than covid”.  This is not news. But the ongoing campaign has been accelerating in recent weeks.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

I have written about this a lot over the last few years – see here and here and here. It started almost as soon as Covid started, and has been steadily progressing ever since, with some reports calling climate change “worse than covid”.

But if they keep talking about it, I’ll keep writing. And hopefully the awareness will spread.

Anyway, there’s a renewed push on the “climate = public health crisis” front. It started, as so many things do, with Bill Gates, stating in an interview with MSNBC in late September:

We have to put it all together; it’s not just climate’s over here and health is over here, the two are interacting

Since then there’s been a LOT of “climate change is a public health crisis” in the papers, likely part of the build-up to the UN’s COP28 summit later this year.

Following Gate’s lead, what was once a slow-burn propaganda drive has become a dash for the finish line, with that phrase repeated in articles all over the world as a feverish catechism.

It was an editorial in the October edition of the British Medical Journal that got the ball rolling, claiming to speak for over 200 medical journals, it declares it’s…

Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency”

Everyone from the Guardian to the CBC to the Weather Channel picked up this ball and ran with it.  Other publications get more specific, but the message is the same. Climate change is bad for the health of women, and children, and poor people, and Kenyans, and workers and…you get the idea.

And that’s all from just the last few days. It’s not only the press, but governments and NGOs too. The “One Earth” non-profit reported, two days ago:

Why climate change is a public health issue

Again, based entirely on that letter to the BMJ. The UN’s “climate champions” are naturally all over it,alongside the UK’s “Health Alliance on Climate Change”, whoever they are. [Note:  An overview of the climate medicine bureaucracy is here: https://rclutz.com/2021/09/07/here-comes-the-climate-medical-complex/%5D

Both the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have published (or updated) articles on their website in the last few days using variations on the phrase “The climate crisis is a health crisis.”  Local public health officials from as far apart as Western Australia and Arkansas are busy “discussing the health effects of climate change”

Tellingly, the Wikipedia article on “effects of climate change on human health” has received more edits in the last 3 weeks than the previous 3 months combined.

All of this is, of course, presided over by the World Health Organization.

On October 12th the WHO updated its climate change fact sheet, making it much longer than the previous version and including some telling new claims:

“WHO data indicates 2 billion people lack safe drinking water and 600 million suffer from foodborne illnesses annually, with children under 5 bearing 30% of foodborne fatalities. Climate stressors heighten waterborne and foodborne disease risks. In 2020, 770 million faced hunger, predominantly in Africa and Asia. Climate change affects food availability, quality and diversity, exacerbating food and nutrition crises.

Temperature and precipitation changes enhance the spread of vector-borne diseases. Without preventive actions, deaths from such diseases, currently over 700,000 annually, may rise. Climate change induces both immediate mental health issues, like anxiety and post-traumatic stress, and long-term disorders due to factors like displacement and disrupted social cohesion.”

They are tying “climate change” to anyone who is malnourished, has intestinal parasites or contaminated drinking water. As well as anyone who dies from heat, cold, fire or flood. Even mental health disorders.

We’ve already seen the world’s first “diagnosis of climate change”.
With parameters set this wide, we will see more in no time.

Just as a “Covid death” was anybody who died “of any cause after testing positive for Covid”, they are putting language in place that can redefine almost any illness or accident as a “climate change-related health issue”.

Two days ago, the Director General of the World Health Organization, the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health and COP28 President co-authored an opinion piece for the Telegraph, headlined:

Climate change is one of our biggest health threats – humanity faces a staggering toll unless we act

The WHO Director went on to repeat the claim almost word for word on Twitter yesterday:

At the same time, the Pandemic Treaty is busily working its way through the bureaucratic maze, destined to become law sometime in the next year or so.

We’ve written about that a lot too.

    • Consider, the WHO is the only body on Earth empowered to declare a “pandemic”.
    • Consider, the official term is not “pandemic”, but rather “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”.
    • Consider, a “public health emergency of international concern”, does not necessarily mean a disease.
    • It could mean, and I’m just spit-balling here, oh, I don’t know – maybe… climate change?

Consider, finally, that one clause in the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” would empower the WHO to declare a PHEIC on “precautionary principle” [my emphasis]:

Future declarations of a PHEIC by the WHO Director-General should be based on the precautionary principle where warranted

Essentially, once the new legislation is in place, the plan writes itself:

    • Put new laws in place enabling global “emergency measures” in the event of a future “public health emergency”
    • Declare climate change a public health emergency, or maybe a “potential public health emergency”
    • Activate emergency measures – like climate lockdowns – until climate change is “fixed”

See the end game here? It’s just that simple.

Oh, and we won’t be able to complain, because “climate denial” is going to be illegal. At least, if prominent climate activists like this one get their way.  That’s only a whisper in the background right now, but it will get louder after COP28, just wait.

Until then, like I said, I’m stuck here writing forever.

Background:  Nine Elements Shared by Climate and Covid

Ramesh Thakur writes at Brownstone Institute Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessons offered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.

1. Elites’ Hypocrisy

The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.

Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.

2. Data Challenged Models

A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”

Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:

♦  In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action.
♦  In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting.
♦  In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”
♦  Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.

3. No Dissent Allowed

Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.

Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.

4. We Want You to Panic

Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.

Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.”

5. Only Trust Science Authorities

A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.

6. Government Empowers Itself

A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.

Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful.

Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising,
and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.

7. Self-Inflicted Damage

Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.

Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.

8. Elites Thrive at Others’ Expense

Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.

In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.

Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?

9. Global Bureaucrats Gut National Sovereignty

The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation.

In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful
vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.