Climate Politics

Choices Usurped by Self Righteous Tyrants

Posted on by Ron Clutz

William Watson writes at Financial Post Self-righteous totalitarian tinkering and the end of gas-powered cars.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Canadians often get to vote on important local projects.
When did we all vote on abolishing gas engines?

I am happy to report that democracy is alive and well in the Montreal suburb where I live and by all appearances completely uninfluenced by the Chinese Communist Party.

My evidence is purely anecdotal: the steady stream of voters arriving at the advance poll held Sunday at the almost 60-year-old town arena to cast their ballot in a referendum on whether we should replace that self-same arena — famous as being the coldest in all of Montreal — with a new almost $40-million sports complex that would include a new arena. The federal and provincial governments have pledged $12.5 million and private fundraising has brought in a few million more but the bulk of the money would be provided by the town, partly through new debt issue.

Getting citizen approval (or rejection) of that issue was the purpose of the referendum,
which was called after the requisite number of voters registered their request for it.

My guess is the new arena won’t pass. It has been discussed for several years and the amount that was always mentioned was at most $20 million so when this spring the lowest contractor bid came in at $38 million, that was a shock. There has been lots of back and forth at various meetings and a flurry of flyers in the mail debating pros and cons, including what the effect on property taxes will be. I suspect the strong turnout means people don’t want to pay more to service the higher debt. But we’ll know when the final vote takes place next week. What’s most important is that there seems to be widespread agreement that the vote is the final word — though in this litigious age it’s not inconceivable that whichever side loses may try their luck in the courts.

Whatever the outcome, it has been a great exercise in democracy. And it has left me feeling I’d like to have a direct say in other decisions that will have an important effect on my life. One that comes to mind immediately is Ottawa’s decision to do away with gasoline-powered cars.

By 2035, ministers Steven Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson decreed in 2021,
the “mandatory target,” i.e., the requirement, for all new
“light-duty cars and passenger trucks” is that they be zero-emission.

Thus will end, in this country at least, the widespread use of the internal-combustion engine for personal transportation, a technology that since its first commercially successful use in the 19th century, has brought unprecedented prosperity and freedom of movement to literally billions of people around the world and largely made possible the much-decried suburban lifestyle that is currently under all-out attack from car-less urban sophisticates. It has also over the decades undergone continuous and considerable refinement in terms of efficiency, noise and exhaust, so that modern combustion engines are barely recognizable compared to early versions.

In 2021, Statistics Canada tells us, more than 26.2 million “road motor vehicles” were registered in this country, which works out to not quite one car per adult Canadian (depending where you draw the age line for adult, of course).

Of those 26.2 million registered motor vehicles, 303,073 were hybrid-electric, 152,685 battery-electric and 95,896 plug-in electric — so some 551,000 in total, or a little over two per cent, were low or no emissions. Except that net-zero absolutists really don’t like hybrid vehicles, which run part of the time on fossil fuels, so the true proportion of elite-acceptable net-zero vehicles was under one per cent. And we’re now in 2023, which means 2035 is just 12 years away. What contortions will the car industry, not to mention the economy, have to be put through so that in those 12 short years all new cars are net-zero? The hubris of people willing to impose such contortions is breathtaking.

Whether or not my town gets a new arena will in fact have much less impact on my life than whether in 12 years we Canadians will be forbidden from acquiring a newly produced internal combustion engine car. Yet while my opinion on the arena is being sought and respected nobody ever asked my opinion about whether or not to ban gas cars.

As Lionel Shriver, one of my favourite columnists, put it in London’s Spectator magazine last week: “We’ve entered an era of unaccountable bureaucratic imposition that’s only going to get worse … Bans on the sale of new petrol cars by 2030 and gas boilers in new homes by 2025 that no one voted for are just the beginning of a self-righteous totalitarian tinkering with our daily lives that makes a mockery of the notion that democracies are governed by consent.”

She was writing about Britain and in particular London’s “ultra-low emissions zone,” in which non-complying cars pay a charge of £12.50 a day. But she could have been writing about this country or indeed any western democracy, in all of which officials seem firmly in control and voters essentially powerless.

“Self-righteous totalitarian tinkering” is a phrase that
these days echoes familiarly in Canada.

Absurd Climate Blame Game

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Lorrie Goldstein explains.at Toronto Sun in above video Guilbeault  Plays Absurd Blame Game–Attacks Conservatives, but not China, on climate change.  Transcript from closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

PM Trudeau: We will raise Canada’s price on carbon pollution Rising by 15 a ton starting in 2023 and rising to 170 Canadian dollars per ton by 2030.

Federal environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault says the Trudeau government could be more effective in fighting climate change were it not for the opposition of the federal conservatives. He told CTV news that he would like to do things like, for example, speeding up Canada’s goal of net zero emissions, possibly lowering it to 2040 instead of the current 2050.

Now his argument is absurd on a number of fronts. First of all Stephen Guilbeault and the Trudeau government don’t need the permission of the conservatives to lower our emissions targets to 2040 instead of 2050. He didn’t need them to set the 2050 Target; why would he need them for the 2040 Target?

And in terms of keeping in power to fight climate change, his government doesn’t need the support of the federal conservatives. So far the NDP are supporting him. And if anything they want the government to go faster in fighting climate change.

But the more important issue is that it doesn’t matter what Canada’s Target is. It also doesn’t matter how much we pay in carbon taxes or clean fuel regulations or subsidies to corporate green companies. None of that matters, the reason being Canada’s emissions are a rounding error in terms of global emissions.

Nothing Canada does on its own is going to slow the rate of wildfires or floods
or wind storms or severe weather in Canada. Zero Effect.

Why? Here’s a few numbers according to the federal government. In 2019 our emissions were 724 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The global total is 48,000 million tons. China’s total, as the largest single emitter in the world, was about 12,700 million tons. Tony Keller in the Globe and Mail made a good analogy about this. He said to think of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as water in a swimming pool. What’s happening is that in Canada we’re trying to lower the level of the water using a soup spoon, and meanwhile China and other countries are filling up the pool using a fire hose.

Now if Stephen Guilbeault and Trudeau really want to be more effective in fighting climate change, they shouldn’t be attacking the conservatives; they should be attacking China’s dictators.

Now we’re always accused, even by our own government, that Canadians are wanton wasters of energy because we are the highest per capita emitters in the world. That’s an absurd metric to use particularly for Canada. Because we are the second coldest country on Earth, the second largest country on Earth, and we have a relatively small population.

Use another metric that has been used, emissions per square kilometer. Lo and behold Canada becomes one of the lowest emitters in the developed world. It’s true that what you get always depends on what you measure.

The only practical effect of our emission targets and paying more for oil and gas to heat our homes and everything else is: In theory it gives Justin Trudeau the moral authority to attempt to use moral persuasion on countries like China to lower their emissions.

Of course we already know from experience how well Canada’s
moral influence works on China’s dictators.

Postscript:  A Voice from Silent Canadians

 

Net Zero Zealots are Treating the Public Like Fools

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A summary at The Telegraph of David Frost’s recent lecture, in italics with my bolds.

Some of the worst policies ever pursued in this country have been those which nearly all politicians supported at the time. Keeping Britain on the gold standard. Running down our Armed Forces in the 1930s. Demolishing our historic cities and replacing them with concrete. Joining the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. Only a handful of free thinkers questioned these at the time. But when the disastrous results became clear, suddenly few people wanted to defend them.

Now, of course, consensuses can be correct, too. Most people agree that free trade is a good thing. But no one could say that that policy has been unchallenged. Indeed, although it is repeatedly attacked, both intellectual argument and real life keep proving it right.

That is why challenge and argument are so important. When everyone agrees on a policy, it is never seriously questioned. The arguments for it become ritualised. Zombie numbers get repeated from one document to another, however feeble their real underpinning – remember the three million jobs we were told for 20 years depended on EU membership? And its advocates don’t feel the need to invest any effort in defending it, because it’s easier just to smear its opponents.

So the cross-party agreement on the totemic policy of our time –
net zero 2050 – is troubling.

By all means accept the scientific consensus: it doesn’t seem to me to depict “climate catastrophe”. But net zero 2050 isn’t science. It’s a political goal enshrining a particular view of the trade-offs facing us as a result of climate change. It makes assumptions about how our economies and societies work which must be open to question. If no one ever does question it, we will inevitably end up with bad policy and bad results. That’s why I refuse to remain silent.

All these economic assumptions seem to me to be highly suspect. That’s partly because predicting the future is very difficult, and in this case we can prove that, because so many of the predictions in Labour’s Energy White Paper 20 years ago turned out to be wrong.

You might think, therefore, that the right thing for governments to do would be to invest in basic scientific research, to establish a simple regime for taxing the externality of carbon emissions at whatever level we think justified – and then stand back and let the market sort out how best to meet the policy goal.

You might think that, but you would be wrong. Governments have all decided
that they know best and can pick the technologies, the subsidies,
and the targets to get us to net zero.

That’s why you will be forced to buy ineffective boilers and expensive electric cars. That’s why you’re made to pay for windmills, a technology that was cutting-edge just after the Norman Conquest. That’s why our electricity grid is getting less reliable while at the same time energy bills go ever higher.

Some voters are clearly doubtful. So Western governments now go further, and argue that all these inferior technologies will actually improve economic growth – by a grand total of 2 per cent in 2050, according to reports quoted in Chris Skidmore’s Net Zero Review.

Sorry, but I don’t believe it. This whole area is riddled with economic fallacies:
counting benefits but not the costs; optimism bias;
illusory certainty and misplaced confidence in prediction.

There’s the belief that raising taxes to pay subsidies will not damage the wider economy. There’s the “broken windows fallacy”: just as repairing a broken window does not make you any better off, and you also lose the chance to spend the money on something more productive, so scrapping one system of energy production and replacing it with another does not make us richer – especially when the new system is worse than its predecessor.

There’s the faith that massive projects like insulating every house in the country can be undertaken simply and speedily with just an effort of will. And finally there’s the view that “green jobs”, many of them required to install all those less efficient technologies, are somehow a benefit rather than a cost. If you believe that, you must think we could make ourselves wealthier by sending everyone back into the fields to work the land.

Stop treating us like idiots. If we are told things will get better, and then they get worse, voters will in the end rebel against the policy. Look at the migration figures if you doubt that. I personally believe we will have to rethink the net zero methods and the timetable. Of course I might be wrong. But let’s have a proper debate and real honesty, not smears and cancellations.

One of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs, Not Dark Yet, is a reflection on his own waning powers and mortality. We need to make the same reflection about our society. Not only whether we literally go dark, because we can’t keep the lights on any more, but whether we in the West can actually summon the strength to resist degrowth, miserabilism and economic decline. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Time to stop, and rethink.

The text of David Frost’s lecture ‘Not Dark Yet’ is available at GWPF

Green Schemes Broken by Reality

Posted on by Ron Clutz

James E. Hanley provides a roundup of failed Green expensive ventures in his Real Clear Policy article Green Projects Hit Iron Wall.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Developers looking to build thousands of wind turbines off the Mid-Atlantic and New England coast are coming up against a force even more relentless than the Atlantic winds: the Iron Law of Megaprojects, offering a warning of the trouble ahead for green-energy projects.

The Iron Law, coined by Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, says that “megaprojects” — which cost billions of dollars, take years to complete, and are socially transformative — reliably come in over budget, over time, over and over.

From Boston’s Big Dig to California’s high-speed rail to
New York’s 12 years-overdue and 300% over-budget East Side Access rail project,
big boondoggles routinely demonstrate the validity of the rule.

Offshore wind projects are not immune to the Iron Law, regularly experiencing vast cost overruns before a single watt is generated.

The New York state government, looking to replace oil- and gas-fired powerplants with hundreds of wind towers off Long Island, set out in 2019 to create an offshore wind supply chain from scratch, beginning with a massive state-funded turbine fabrication facility about 100 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River.

Port of Albany factory’s fate at stake as leaders race for a solution The $700 million-plus project is expected to create work for generations, but hopes are dwindling that more funding will become available

Ground still hasn’t even been broken, but the budget certainly has: The price of that Port of Albany facility has already doubled from $350 million to $700 million. An additional $100 million may be needed for equipment costs, raising the final price tag to $800 million.

It’s been billed the future hub for wind power infrastructure. So far, though, the only thing that continues to get billed over and over in recent years is the Connecticut taxpayer.

A similar situation is playing out in New London, Connecticut, where a state-funded pier facility being built to support that state’s offshore wind buildout has more than doubled in price from an original estimate of $95 million to $250 million.

Commonwealth Wind Declares that the largest offshore wind farm in the state’s pipeline “cannot be financed and built” under existing contracts,

And in Massachusetts, developer Commonwealth Wind has asked the state to scrap its power purchase guarantees and rebid the project, arguing that inflation and supply chain problems mean the project is not financially viable under its current contracts.

Big projects tend to exceed their cost projections for many reasons. One is the unanticipated, and sometimes unprecedented, complexity of these projects. Further uncertainties and costs arise from the challenge of navigating the red tape of the modern regulatory state. In addition, there is the risk of inflation for projects that take years, sometimes decades, to develop.

Underlying all these is often a failure to spend enough time on careful planning
that treats reality as a fundamental constraint.

But sometimes project sponsors may simply worry that accurate cost projections could scare away public support at the outset, and choose to employ what Prof. Flyvbjerg politely calls “strategic misrepresentation.”

As former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said, “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. . . . Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”

If that sounds too cynical, note that the current Chair of the Connecticut Port Authority has admitted that when officials first proposed the pier facility, they already knew it would cost more than they were claiming.

Ironically, the New York and Connecticut projects aren’t even big enough to be considered megaprojects, and yet even they have run into the Iron Law of being over budget and behind schedule. The challenges won’t diminish with bigger and more ambitious green energy projects.

In New York, the state’s huge Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — of which the Port of Albany project is the first substantial investment — is projected to cost between $270 and $290 billion. At that price it is a gigaproject composed of numerous individual megaprojects.

The benefits, mostly in the form of greenhouse gas reductions, are supposed to be up to $415 billion. But if the overall cost of the policy climbs by merely 55 percent, which is in the normal range for megaprojects (and much less than the Port of Albany cost overrun), the costs will exceed the benefits, creating a net loss for New Yorkers.

If costs balloon to twice the initial estimates, which is not uncommon, the state stands to spend more than more than a hundred billion dollars more than gained in benefits That would be a loss of over $30,000 per New York household by 2050.

And that’s assuming the benefits are as good as promised. It gets even worse if,
as is common, the benefits have been overstated.

The tale of megaprojects is a cautionary one for the whole country as we attempt to transition away from fossil fuels. Cost estimates for a nationwide transition span from $4.7 trillion to over $60 trillion – almost three times U.S. GDP. Such uncertainty should give us pause for thought before jumping wildly into the financial unknown.

If we’re not careful, we may be digging Willie Brown-style holes, and politically and financially we may find ourselves in too deep to ever get ourselves out.

We’re Betrayed by Decarbonists and Cowardly Energy Companies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Edward Ring writes at American Greatness The Corruption of Climate Science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Instead of fighting anti-civilization lunacy,
corporations are taking their money off the table,
along with their life-affirming affordable fuel.

We need to criticize the people who got us here,” says Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of Fossil Future. “We can’t keep treating these designated experts as real experts. They are not real experts, they are destroyers. They are anti-energy, non-experts. And that needs to be made clear.”

Epstein is right, and his advice has never been more urgent—or as difficult to make people understand. It is no exaggeration that every major institution in America has now committed itself to the elimination of affordable and abundant energy. If it isn’t stopped, this commitment, motivated by misguided concern for the planet but also by a lust for power and money and enabled by moral cowardice and intellectual negligence, will destroy Western civilization.

For over 50 years, with increasing frequency, corrupted, careerist scientists have produced biased studies that, amplified by agenda-driven corporate and political special interests, constitute a “consensus” that is supposedly “beyond debate.” We are in a “climate crisis.” To cope with this climate emergency, all measures are justifiable.  This is overblown, one-sided, distorted, and manipulative propaganda.

It is the language of authoritarians and corporatists bent on achieving
even more centralized political power and economic wealth.

It is a scam, perhaps the most audacious, all-encompassing fraud in human history. It is a scam that explicitly targets and crushes the middle class in developed nations and the entire aspiring populations in developing nations, at the same time as its messaging is designed to secure their fervent acquiescence.

What is actually beyond debate is not that we are in a climate crisis but that if we don’t stop destroying our conventional energy economy, we are going to be in a civilizational crisis.

Energy is the foundation of everything—prosperity, freedom, upward mobility, national wealth, individual economic independence, functional water and transportation infrastructure, commercial-scale agriculture, mining, and industry. Without energy, it all goes dark. And “renewables” are not even remotely capable of replacing oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power. It’s impossible.

The only people who think renewables are capable of replacing conventional energy
are either uninformed, innumerate, or corrupt. Period.

But to cope with the apocalyptic messaging of climate catastrophists, it isn’t enough to debunk the potential of renewables. It is also necessary to challenge the underlying climate “science.” The biased, corrupt, unceasing avalanche of expert “studies” serving up paid-for ideas to special interests that use them as bludgeons to beat into the desired shape every relevant public policy and popular narrative. So here goes.

Biased, Flawed Studies

A new study, released May 16, deserves far more criticism than it’s going to get. Authored by seven ridiculously credentialed experts and primarily affiliated with the leftist Union of Concerned Scientists, this study has the rather innocuous title: “Quantifying the contribution of major carbon producers to increases in vapor pressure deficit and burned area in western US and southwestern Canadian forests.” Bursting with charts and equations, and too many links to corroborating sources to count, the study has all the accouterments of intimidating credibility. But serious questions may be raised as to its logic as well as its objectivity.

For starters, this study doesn’t restrict itself to “Quantifying the contribution of major carbon producers to increases in vapor pressure deficit.” The authors can’t resist attacking these “major carbon producers.” In this revealing paragraph, the study’s true intent becomes apparent: it is fodder for litigation.

To explain what the authors got wrong, it is first necessary to summarize what they did. In plain English, the authors claim that hotter summers in recent years have caused more severe forest fires in the western United States, and fossil fuel emissions are causing the hotter summers.  That’s it.

But what if it isn’t just heat, but dry heat, that is unprecedented today? What if the “vapor pressure deficit” is worse today than it has been at any time in 20 million years? That is a huge assumption, probably impossible to verify. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t make up for the study’s other flaw, which is the density of forests in California today, which is truly unprecedented. The study’s authors acknowledge they don’t take this variable into account.

In California, wildlife biologists and forest ecologists who spend their lives studying and managing these timberlands unanimously agree that tree density has increased, thanks to “non-climatic factors such as the prohibition of Indigenous burning, and legacies of fire suppression.” The increase is not subtle. Without small, naturally occurring fires that clear underbrush and smaller trees, forests become overgrown. Controlled burns and responsible logging are absolutely necessary to maintain forest health.

This is not an isolated finding. Observations of excessive tree density are corroborated by numerous studies, testimony, and journalistic investigations. Unlike the subjectively defined algorithms plugged into a climate model, excessive tree density is an objective fact, verified repeatedly by people on the ground. To imply by omission that more than tripling the density of trees across millions of acres of forest would not leave them stressed and starved for soil nutrients, sunlight, and water from rain and atmospheric moisture is scientific malpractice.

Without taking these additional factors into account, it is deceptive
to indict fossil fuel emissions for causing wildfires.

Perhaps some indirect connection can be established of debatable relevance, but for this study to assign specific percentages and acreages suggests a premeditated purpose: creating material for expert testimony for litigation against oil companies.

The monolithic alignment of the scientific and journalistic community in support of an authoritarian, utterly impractical “climate” agenda reveals a misunderstanding if not outright betrayal of scientific and journalistic core values. Both disciplines are founded on the bedrock of skepticism and debate. Without nurturing those values, the integrity of these disciplines is undermined. When it comes to issues of climate and energy policy in America, science and journalism are compromised.

Carbon Fuel Industry Fails to Step Up

The real crime, if you want to call it that, isn’t that oil and gas companies
questioned climate change theories back in the 1960s or ’70s.
It’s that they’re accepting them now.

Oil and gas companies today are not willing to challenge the climate crisis orthodoxy, or the myth of cost-effective renewables at scale. They aren’t willing to devote their substantial financial resources to debunking this agenda-driven madness that is on the verge of taking down our entire civilization. The fact that America’s oil and gas companies have adopted a strategy of appeasement is a crime against humanity. The fact that these companies are failing to make long-term investments to develop new oil and gas fields, and instead are reaping windfall profits as they sell existing production at politically inflated prices, that, too, is a crime against civilization.

Ultimately, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the major oil companies
are complicit in the destruction of America’s energy economy.

Because rather than declaring total war on these paid-for, flawed scientific studies and the special interests that fund them, oil companies will engage in theatrical litigation, knowing that the cost of settlements won’t even come close to the short-term profits to be had by slowly asset stripping their companies while selling diminishing quantities of fuel at punitive rates.

Epstein is right that we must criticize the “experts” that want to destroy human civilization with climate alarmism. But we must also recognize and criticize the institutions targeted for destruction. Instead of fighting this lunacy, they are taking their money off the table, along with their life-affirming affordable fuel, and heading for the hills.

 

Google Screens Your Climate Info

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jimmy Dore reports in the above video on collusion between UN and Google to control public access to climate information .  Below is a transcript from the closed captions.  JD is the host with some asides from Kurt Metzger (KM)  The UN spokesperson is Melissa Fleming (MF), United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. Text in italics with my bolds and added images.

JD: It turns out Google is the richest company in the history of humanity–did you know that Google gets more money than Exxon, more money than Apple. They have more money than Tesla, they have a lot of money.   “Google teams up with the UN for verified climate information.” So this is an article from the United Nations, This is from April 22nd of last year.

KM: Well I hope they fight nitrogen deniers.

JD:  So I don’t know if we covered this, which is why I want to cover it now. Did you know that if you Google climate change, Google has now rigged it. It’s not just, well whatever the most popular websites are that talk about climate change come up; the order of the 10 most popular articles.

That’s not what they’re doing. They’re making sure that the popular articles don’t show up and they’re trying to control the narrative. They only want certain ones, only articles the United Nations approves of. That’s what Google’s doing.

KM  Look, millions of people around the world go to Google to get information about climate change and sustainability.  Nobody is going: What about sustainability? What about that word you just invented a couple years ago? Sustainability, sustainability.

JD:  In addition to organic search results, Google is surfacing short and easy to understand information panels and visuals on the causes and effects of climate change as well as individual actions that people can take to help tackle the climate crisis

KM  Should I glue my head to a painting?

JD:  So here is the under Secretary General for Global Communications at the UN;  ready.

MF: Served with Google for example. If you Google climate change, at the top of your search you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we googled , climate change we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.

JD: So when she Googled climate change, she was getting a lot of articles that she didn’t agree with. They would come up because what Google is supposedly doing is just showing you what’s the most popular articles, without an editorial input. She’s saying we didn’t like that people were getting to see those articles that were popular that we disagree with. So we went to Google and we told them artificially manufacture your Google results when people Google climate change. And have these special articles that we like come up, those that push a specific agenda about climate change. And they say it right out in public, she’s saying it on camera.

KM  I’m relieved.  It was about time they started doing this, so I was happy to hear it

MF:  So we’re becoming much more proactive. You know, we own the science and we think that the world should know.

JD:  Like the Vatican, we own the science. You mean like Tony fauci did. And then he had to admit that he was lying constantly during covid because he was. We Own the science, we own the science: Nobody owns the science, science doesn’t work like that, there’s no such thing. It’s always: Question science. Science always needs to be questioned and tested, always. That’s why Einstein didn’t trust what Newton said about gravity, he had his own ideas. And now we know about E equals m c squared.

MF: And the platforms themselves also do, but again it’s a huge, huge challenge, that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in. We need total control.

JD:  We own the science sounds about right. So if you thought when you Google something you’re getting organic natural results, no you’re getting propaganda selected by people like her, articles they want you to have. They want to control your thoughts, and they are. And that’s what propaganda is. They’re all propaganda and they just brag about doing propaganda right in the open.

KM:  I’ve heard we own the Sciences, the second time I heard it that sounds like a catchphrase or something.

JD:  Someone says we own the science, we own the science. No what you own is the Google results on the science. So that means you own the conversation and the narrative in the culture. But you don’t own the science. Own the science, what kind of a thing is that to say I don’t know.

 

Enforcing Climate Correctness (Fact Checking)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Serfs attacking Climate Establishment

Phys.org sounds the alarm: Meteorologists targeted in climate misinfo surge.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.

Users on Twitter and other social media falsely accused Spain’s weather agency of engineering a drought, Australia’s of doctoring its thermometers and France’s of exaggerating global warming through misplaced weather stations.

“The coronavirus is no longer a trend. Conspiracy theorists and deniers who used to talk about that are now spreading disinformation about climate change,” Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, told AFP.

“These scientific bodies are seen as part of the establishment, so anything they say may get disputed on social networks.

“They are providing evidence against what the climate deniers claim, so the latter try to discredit them.”

Maybe if they stuck to weather reporting? See Climate Evangelists Are Taking Over Your Local Weather Forecast

Australian thermometers

In a case investigated by AFP Fact Check, conservative media and Facebook users shared unfounded claims that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) doctored its temperature readings.

In an analysis of data obtained via a freedom of information request, prominent climate skeptic Jennifer Marohasy said BOM’s electronic probes returned readings up to 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer than those of its older mercury thermometers.

Experts who analyzed the data said the claims were inaccurate.

Monash University emeritus environment professor Neville Nicholls said the difference between most readings on the electronic probes and the mercury thermometers was negligible—between zero and 0.1C (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit).

The World Meteorological Organization told AFP that the BOM’s measurements were in line with its standards, contrary to Marohasy’s allegation.

Marohasy makes her case in video below.

Several examples in the article shows they are relying on fact checking by AFP (Agence France Presse).  So the AFP Fact Check follows the usual procedure:  get quotes from establishment supporters in order to isolate and cancel a finding contrary to “consensus” climate science.

More from AFP to See How the Enforcement Works

Climate ‘declaration’ recirculates debunked claims.Excerpt in italics with my bolds

First Attack:   Big Oil Funds Them, So They Lie

However seven of the signatories to the declaration were identified on the list as having worked for Shell and eight others as having worked in the oil industry. Crok confirmed to AFP that Berkhout himself worked for the firm “about 40 years ago.” Besides these, there were 13 petroleum engineers and petroleum geologists, plus several mining specialists.

Several signatories had links, either mentioned on the list or documented elsewhere, to US climate-skeptic free-market groups with ties to the oil industry: the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute.

These groups each received money from oil giant ExxonMobil, according to donor and tax documents published by Greenpeace (here, here and here). The company has been accused of undermining science to protect its fossil fuel business — a charge it denies.

Second Attack:  Only Some Signatories are Climatologists

According to an AFP count of the declaration’s signatories, about 10 explicitly described themselves as climatologists or climate scientists, fewer than one percent of the total. A few others described themselves as specialists in paleoclimatology and atmospheric sciences.

There were approximately 40 geophysicists, 130 geologists and 200 engineers of various kinds, plus several mathematicians, medical doctors and agricultural scientists.

Thirdly:  IPCC is the Final Authority

Documents accrediting the mainstream scientific view on climate change are more comprehensive than the World Climate Declaration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invited 721 experts from 90 countries to be authors and editors of its three-part Sixth Assessment Report, released between August 2021 and April 2022.

The report constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of scientific knowledge on climate change. Each part was some 3,000 pages long. The authors reviewed hundreds of studies that were listed in the reference sections. It says there is “unequivocal” evidence that humans are warming the climate by burning fossil fuels.

Finally, Refer to Insider Supporters to Refute Claims

Examples in the AFP fact check include Carbon Brief and World Weather Attribution.

Why Should We Believe A Bunch of Journalists like AFP?

Well, because they pass the media bias test;

Who is behind Media Bias Fact Checks and what is their POV?

From Climate Change Dispatch ‘Media Bias/Fact Check’ Site Served With Cease And Desist, Gets Fact-Checked.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Today, PSI has issued Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) site owner, Dave Van Zandt with a pre-action legal notice to take down the defamatory and false smear.

Ironically, the self-styled ‘MEDIA BIAS/FACT CHECK‘ (MB/FC) which negatively fact-checked PSI admits it relies on the subjective bias to decide how biased others are. In other words, MB/FC is a pseudoscientific fact checker!

Apart from unlawfully smearing PSI, Mr. Van Zandt has smeared other websites that publish scientific articles critical of man-made global warming claims. Among the unfairly smeared are:

  • Climate Change Dispatch
  • CFACT
  • WUWT

Below we help readers to fact-check the pseudo-fact-checker. We put Dave Van Zandt the faceless fact-checker under the microscope and discovered the following:

♦  Van Zandt Cites No Scientific Qualifications At All
♦  Van Zandt Was Exposed By WND As A Fraud And A Liar
♦  Van Zandt’s Website (MBFC) Does Not Apply Any Objective Scientific Method
♦  MBFC Relies On Unverifiable Subjectivity (Own Bias) To Make Judgments

Climate Enforcers Appeal to Membership in IFCN

Both AFP and MBFC stake their credibility on belonging to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).  Who’s behind that authority?  WND discussed them in their article The 9 fakest fake-news checkers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In the past Facebook announced it would use the International Fact-Checking Network, or IFCN, to check on the legitimacy of news articles posted to the social media site.

IFCN is hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and funded, in part, by Google and foundations of leftist billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates. Soros donated $25 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The Daily Mail reported that Clinton super-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is also backing the project.

The website reveals: “Poynter’s IFCN has received funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations and the Park Foundation.”

Summary:  

There’s a well-funded industry dedicated to curating the news for the sake of “right-thinking” public opinion. It’s a closed loop of self-appointed authorities who validate each other, and excommunicate unbelievers.  Woe to those who outsource their critical intelligence to such.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Objection! Warming Alarm is Hearsay, Lacking Evidence.

Posted on by Ron Clutz

C3 Headlines reports: The Real Climate Science Crisis: The Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) Hypothesis Is Without Scientific Evidence.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For a hypothesis to reach the status of being a legit theory, it requires withstanding the onslaught of observed empirical evidence. The CAGW hypothesis is no such animal.

Known by its more contemporary aliases, such as ”climate crisis,” “climate emergency,” “climate collapse,” or “existential threat,” the CAGW has zero empirical evidence to support it.

Unlike the related hypothesis regarding greenhouse gases (GHG) and global warming, at least the GHG hypothesis has warming global temperature data that somewhat coincides with increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, putting aside the growing possibility that the purported cause-and-effect direction is probably the reverse. [Note:  See Temps Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse. 2023 Update]

In order to reach a CAGW climate disaster, global warming temperatures must change rapidly in an accelerating manner that will initiate a ‘tipping point’ for the climate.

The rapid acceleration would present its occurrence in a continuous increasing of the slope, i.e., trend, of temperatures, such as monthly temperatures. Each subsequent month would represent a greater temperature magnitude increase than the month before, hypothetically.

To enlarge open image in new tab.

But those tipping point precursors are not occurring in the real-world climate.

For example, it is agreed by all climate scientists that oceans play a very major role in the world’s climate and its global temperatures due to their being both the world’s largest carbon sink and its largest heat content storage.

However, despite these characteristics, in totality, the global oceans HAVE NOT warmed since the year 2014. And certainly, there is no empirical evidence that oceans exhibit constant temperature increases of magnitude.

Quite the contrary, combined oceans exhibit a regular pattern of temperature decreases and increases, as the adjacent plot of NOAA’s monthly ocean data indicates.

Specifically, this is a plot (dark blue) of moving 5-year temperature changes ending each month of the 60-year period from March 1963 through March 2023.

[Explanation: the first data point is the temperature change for the 60 months ending on March 30, 1963; and the chart’s last temperature change data point is for the five 5 years (i.e. 60 months) ending on March 2023.]

The chart also includes a plot (green) of the moving 60-month CO2 level changes over the same sixty year period, plus a linear trend for both CO2 changes and ocean temperature changes.

The trend of the 60-month CO2 changes significantly exceeds the
slight positive trend of ocean temperature changes by a factor of 117x.

This huge differential undercuts the belief that global warming is primarily the result of GHGs. Which is confirmed by the paltry R^2 of +0.06 – an almost non-existent relationship between 5-year atmospheric CO2 changes and 5-year changes in ocean temperature.

Not only are the large increases in CO2 levels not causing a concerning uptick of temperature change magnitude, it also has not lead to any type of acceleration, per the linear trend since 1963.

Specifically, with a trend of a tiny +0.0001°C, that would project out 20 years to be an increase of 5-year temperature changes to an insignificant amount of +0.024 – definitely not an existential threat of ‘runaway warming’ or a CAGW ‘climate crisis’ as portrayed by bureaucrats, politicians and Hollywood celebrities.

So, if 5 years of increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere barely influence 5-year changes in temperature over a 60-year span, either in magnitude or acceleration rate, then it is highly unlikely that this trace gas would cause a catastrophic climate disaster or an extinction event.

Thus, it is fair to state that for all those scientists pushing a narrative of an imminent climate change catastrophe from CO2 without the requisite empirical evidence, this has become the real climate science crisis facing society.

Notes: Temperature and CO2 data sources.Excel used to calculate 60-mth (5-yr) temperature and CO2 changes; used to calculate the respective trends; used to calculate correlation and r-squared; used to plot the chart.

Away With Self-Fullfilling Climate Prophecy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Edward Ring explains the importance of dispelling CO2 hysteria in his American Greatness article Challenging the Premise of Our Destruction.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Claiming that anthropogenic CO2 will not cause catastrophic climate change is a
credible, necessary point of view backed up by scientific evidence.

The most powerful and destructive perception in the world today is that using fossil fuels will cause catastrophic climate change. This belief, marketed by every major government and corporate institution in the Western world, is the foundational premise underlying a policy agenda of stunning indifference to the aspirations of ordinary people.

The war on fossil fuel is a war on freedom, prosperity, pluralism, independence, national sovereignty, world peace, domestic tranquility, and, most ironically, the environment itself. It is a war of rich against poor, the privileged against the disadvantaged, corporate monopolies against competitive upstarts, Malthusians against optimists, regulators against innovators, and authoritarians against freedom-loving people everywhere.

But this war cannot be won unless the perception is maintained. If fossil fuel is allowed to compete against other energy alternatives for customers as a vital and growing part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, this authoritarian political agenda falls apart.

It is reasonable to question the assertion that eliminating fossil fuels will inevitably result in an impoverished society subject to punitive restrictions on individual behavior. But the numbers are compelling and can be distilled to two indisputable facts: First, fossil fuel continues to provide over 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. Second, if every person living on planet Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to double.

Several inescapable conclusions derive from these two facts, if one assumes that energy is the driver of prosperity. Just in case that is not obvious, imagine Americans living with half as much energy as they use today. Where would the cuts occur? Would they drive their cars half as much? Heat their homes half as much? Operate manufacturing, farming, and mining equipment half as much? They would need to do all those things and more. The economy would collapse.

These consequences don’t escape the intelligentsia who promote “net zero” policies. These consequences explain the policies they advocate. The recent promotion of “15-minute cities” that will inform rezoning and redevelopment to put all essential services within a 15-minute walk of every residence. The rise of “congestion pricing” to charge automobiles special tolls if they drive into an expanding footprint of urban neighborhoods. “Smart growth.” “Infill.” “Urban Service Boundaries.” Bike lanes. “Smart buildings,” “smart meters,” and “smart cities.”

These innovations, all in progress, only begin to describe what is coming.

By restricting new development and systematically reducing the use of fossil fuels, the global middle class will shrink instead of grow. The wealthiest elites will buy their way out of the smart slums. Everyone else will be locked down. This is how energy poverty will play out in the modern era. It cannot be emphasized enough: If energy production is restricted, this will happen. It’s algebra. It is objective fact.

Hardly less speculative is the reaction outside the Western world. What are our elites thinking? Do they intend to start World War III? Perhaps they do. Because nothing short of war is going to stop the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Nigerians, or Bangladeshis from developing every source of energy they possibly can. Just those seven nations account for half the world’s population. That’s 4 billion people. Will they stop developing energy until they at least achieve half the per capita energy consumption that Americans currently enjoy? Not a chance.

Will they get there by relying exclusively on wind and solar? Dream on.

Fossil Fuel Will Not Cause a Climate Catastrophe

If you only believe half of the preceding arguments, you must realize that Americans have been backed into a corner. If anyone calls for abundant energy—or abundant anything, since energy, and fossil fuel in particular, is the prerequisite for virtually all goods and services—they are shouted down as “climate deniers.” And the way to upset the entire edifice is not to merely argue that fossil fuel is essential to the survival of civilization. Because the counterargument is that eliminating fossil fuel is essential to the survival of the planet.

That is an unwinnable argument. It is not possible to reason with an opponent of fossil fuel if you concede their fundamental premise: that burning fossil fuel will cause catastrophic climate change. You either become a “denier,” or you submit to energy poverty.

This is the tough decision facing Americans.

And it’s accurate to also say it is a decision facing Republicans since literally every prominent, mainstream, housebroken, accommodating establishment Republican will not challenge the assertion that we’re experiencing a “climate crisis,” even though most of them know better. But this should be a bipartisan issue. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to show some backbone by rejecting the most destructive and fraudulent premise of our time. In so doing, they would unify their party, attract independent voters, and realign the nation.

The irony is stupefying. Without fossil fuel, America will enter a dark age, and the only way to control a restive population that’s seen its standard of living plummet will be through the establishment of a technology-driven police state. They are the fascists. The so-called climate deniers are fighting for prosperity and freedom.

If you want to save civilization, be a denier.

Say it loud and without reservations, and say it every chance you get. Demand that politicians publicly refute climate alarmism. It isn’t necessary to claim that the powers behind the climate cult want to enslave the world. We don’t know what motivates them. Some just want to get rich on renewables. Some want to use climate change to advance American global hegemony. But all of them rely on a fundamental moral justification: By eliminating fossil fuel, we are saving the planet from certain destruction. Focusing on the possible ulterior motives of climate alarmist leaders without first challenging their core moral argument is a fool’s errand.

There are plenty of environmental challenges. Being an environmentalist is a good thing. But there has to be balance, and there has to be debate. Claiming that anthropogenic CO2 will not cause catastrophic climate change is a credible, necessary point of view backed up by scientific evidence. If more people make that claim, the climate cult can be broken, and civilization can be rescued from oblivion.

See Also A Rational Climate Policy

 

What’s Wrong With “All Cars Shall Be Electric”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

First “Common Good Capitalism” is an Oxymoron

Donald J. Boudreaux explains this newly minted term and that it really means imposing choices in the marketplace.  His AIER article is What’s Called “Common Good Capitalism” Would Work Against the Common Good.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The foundation upon which the case for so-called “common good capitalism” rests is rickety at best. As I explained in my previous column, the empirical claims used to justify this ill-defined version of capitalism range from questionable to downright false, while much of the economic reasoning deployed by “common good capitalists” is a nest of confusion. These flaws alone are enough to fully discredit the case for “common good capitalism.”

Yet “common good capitalism” is marred by an even deeper problem: it rejects the liberalism from which true capitalism springs, the absence of which makes impossible the operation of a dynamic market order that maximizes the prospects of individuals to achieve as many as possible of their goals.

“Common good capitalists” have in mind an economic system profoundly different from that which is championed today by liberal scholars.  What each “common good capitalist” wants is an economic system engineered to serve his or her preferred set of concrete ends. Gone would be the liberal freedom of individuals to choose and pursue their own ends. Under “common good capitalism,” everyone would be conscripted to produce and consume in ways meant to promote only the ends favored by “common good capitalists.”

Note the irony. The economic system that, say, Oren Cass claims to advocate as a means of promoting the common good is, in reality, a means of promoting only the good as conceived by Oren Cass (which, for him, consists largely of an economy with more manufacturing jobs and a smaller financial sector). The hubris here is undeniable. “Common good capitalists” not only presume to have divined which concrete ends are best to guide the actions of hundreds of millions of individuals, nearly all of whom are strangers to them, but also are so confident in their divinations that they advocate pursuing these with the use of force.

 

The liberal doesn’t object to attempts to persuade others to adopt different and, hopefully, better ends. By all peaceful means, do your best to persuade me to embrace, as the lodestar for my choice of concrete ends, Catholic Social Teaching, economic nationalism, Marxism, veganism, or whatever other teaching or -ism you believe best defines the common good. But do not presume that your sincere embrace of a specific system of concrete values provides sufficient warrant for you to compel me and others to behave as if we share your particular values.

To the extent that the state intrudes into market processes in order to redirect
these toward the achievement of particular ends, it replaces market
competition and cooperation with command-economy dirigisme.

Income earners are not allowed to use the fruits of their creativity and efforts as they choose. Instead, consumption ‘decisions’ will be directed by government officials. The result will be a reallocation of resources achieved through the use, mostly, of tariffs and subsidies. And by so redirecting consumption expenditures, the pattern of production will obviously also be changed from what would prevail in a free market. (In fact, the specific goal of most “common good capitalists” seems to be the achievement of a particular manner of production — for example, more factory jobs — than would arise with markets left free.)

The capitalist economy, by its very nature, is not and cannot be
a tool for achieving particular concrete outcomes.

The capitalist economy, instead, is the name that we give to that ongoing, ever-evolving, organic order of production and exchange that arises spontaneously whenever individuals are free to pursue diverse peaceful ends of their own choosing and to do so in whatever peaceful ways they think best. That the results serve the common good is clear, if by “common good” we mean the highest possible chance of as many individuals as possible to achieve as many as possible of their own individually chosen goals. But let the state attempt to constrain and contort economic activity in the pursuit of a particular set of “common” concrete ends that everyone is compelled to serve, and capitalism disappears. It is replaced by what is more accurately called “[fill in the blank]’s-particular-notion-of-the-good statism,” with the blank filled by the name of whichever “common good capitalist” happens currently to be in power.

A Case In Point:  Murphy’s Law Applies to Electric Cars and Trucks 

Forcing Consumers to Purchase Electric Vehicles: A New Low for the Biden Administration by Jonathan Lesser at Real Clear Energy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

If electric vehicles are so wonderful,
why are consumers and businesses being forced to buy them?

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new emissions standards for vehicles, released earlier this month, require manufacturers to increase overall fuel efficiency by over 25% by 2026, effectively mandating that EV’s make up two thirds of car sales. The EPA claims this will provide a total of over $1 trillion in benefits by 2055, reduce crude oil imports by 20 billion barrels, and reduce CO2 emissions by 10 billion tons.

What’s not to like? Just about everything.

Ruinous Economic Impacts

Let’s start with the economic impacts, which will be ruinous. First, the price of EVs will increase; that’s basic economics. The new rules will require that about two-thirds of the vehicles manufacturers sell are EVs. Given that most consumers do not purchase EVs, the best way to do that is to raise prices on internal combustion (ICE) vehicles until they are more costly than EVs. (Today, the reverse is true, with the average EV costing around $65,000, while the average ICE vehicle costs around $48,000.) Increasing provides an umbrella under which EV prices can be raised, too. So, if a consumer or business wants to purchase a new vehicle, they effectively will be forced to buy a more costly EV.

Battery Demand Over the Top

Second, increasing the demand for EVs will increase the demand for the materials to manufacture batteries, which are the single largest cost of an EV. Prices for rare earths, for example, have increased between 60% and 400% since 2020. Prices for lithium, the basic ingredient in most EV batteries, have increased by about 400%. Moreover, the US continues to prevent development of new mines to supply those materials. Instead, China has a stranglehold on them, and lax environmental rules to boot.

Electric Power Mostly Carbon

Then there is the electricity needed to charge those EVs, along with the charging stations in homes, apartment buildings, and on highways. Claims that this electricity will actually reduce emissions are based on huge predicted increases in wind and solar energy development. Yet, the US Energy Information Administration projects that, by 2050, wind and solar will provide only about 40% of electricity supplies. Consequently, much of the electricity needed to charge those millions of EVs will be provided by natural gas and even coal.

So, while the EPA may limit tailpipe emissions,
it will transfer many of those emissions to power plants.

Inflated Electricity Bills

Electricity costs will also increase, negating the anticipated savings from “refuelling” those EVs. That’s why the federal government has provided subsidies for wind and solar energy development for 45 years and why so many states implemented green energy mandates: developers of wind and solar could not, and still cannot, compete on price alone, despite proponents’ claims.

No Measurable Impact on Climate

But let’s suppose those hurdles magically are overcome. The environmental justification for the EPA rule is nonetheless absurd. The claimed reductions in CO2 emissions will have no measurable impact on world climate. Reducing CO2 emissions by 10 billion tons between 2027 and 2055 sounds like a lot. But world CO2 emissions were 34 billion metric tons in 2021 alone. So, over 28 years, the EPA’s proposed rule will reduce CO2 emissions by the equivalent of about four months of world CO2 emissions. And world emissions continue to increase because developing nations, especially China and India, have no intentions to restrict their economies.

Why Impose EVs?

The basic economic impacts, along with the negligible climate benefits, raise a simple question: why is the Biden Administration pursuing this EV windmill-tilting exercise? By effectively forcing consumers and businesses to purchase vehicles they do not want, the Administration will impose yet more damage on American’s standard of living, reducing mobility and raise costs.

That can’t possibly be their goal, right?

If only arm-twisting were prohibited beyond the ring.