The Unofficial Abandonment of the Scientific Method by Climate Alarmists and Democratic Socialists

Alan Carlin | January 19, 2019

The far left of the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly enamored of socialism. Examples include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described democratic socialists. What has been missed is that they appear to be increasingly enamored of policies that in actuality involve junking the scientific method too. Their current favorite agendas, such as the Green New Deal, always include the climate alarmist agenda. As discussed last week, in the links from it, and previously on this blog, the scientific basis for climate alarmism is not just weak, it has been convincingly shown to be invalid. So in actuality, the left wing socialist agenda effectively includes ditching the scientific method despite their protestations to the contrary.

As many have pointed out, socialism does not have a good record as an organizing basis for societal economics (see Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and the Soviet Union) but abandoning the scientific method has never been shown to help anyone except charlatans. But the left wing has managed to get climate alarmism adopted as an official part of the party platform of the Democratic Party. But the scientific problems of climate alarmism are almost never described by the mainstream press or the democratic socialists. It is only blogs such as this that describe the problems. Socialism has a consistent record of making most people worse off economically compared to modern capitalism. But there are people who strongly support it. But I have yet to find serious arguments that abandoning the use of the scientific method promotes public welfare.

As pointed out last week, unofficial abandonment of the scientific method by the left wing of the Democratic Party is what is going on, and they have gotten the rest of the Party to endorse their positions in this regard. I believe that supporters of the scientific method should abandon at least the left wing of the Party and maybe the entire Party as long as long as they do not vigorously support the scientific method both directly and indirectly by insisting that public policies be based on the use of the method. Use of the scientific method and fossil fuels are two of the major reasons the US has had such spectacular success economically and scientifically in recent centuries. Neither are consistent with the current agenda of the far left of the Democratic Party.

Some socialist/Communist governments such as the Soviet Union have had similar problems both economically and scientifically. The results have been disastrous. Is that what we want? The climate alarmists and their “friends” in the far left of the Democratic Party do not dare to openly attack the scientific method, but support for junk climate science that does not satisfy the scientific method shows what their beliefs really are, and they should be judged by the policy ideas they advocate. Yet many academics, even those in scientific fields, reportedly support climate alarmism. They at least should know better.

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Saving The Earth At The Point Of A Bayonet
By George Rasley

One of the new Far Left Democratic Party’s proposals that has been rapidly gaining establishment media support (beside getting rid of President Trump by any means necessary) is the so-called “Green New Deal” proposed by Democratic Socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and her fellow travelers.

Here are the highlights according to our friend Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

First, keep it in the ground by halting all fossil fuel leasing on federal lands and offshore areas; halting all permitting of fossil-fuel power plants, pipelines, and other infrastructure projects; banning fossil-fuel exports; and ending “massive, irrational subsidies” for fossil fuels and nuclear energy, waste incineration, and biomass energy.

Second, “the United States must shift to 100% renewable power by 2035 or earlier.” Large-scale hydro-electric power, biomass, and waste-to-energy do not qualify.

Third, public transport using renewable power only must be vastly expanded; sales of vehicles powered by gas and diesel engines must be banned as quickly as possible; and all such vehicles must be off the roads by 2040 at the latest. Of course, “federal credits for electric vehicles must be expanded.”

Fourth, Congress should “harness the full power of the Clean Air Act.” I’m not sure what more can be done to turn the economy upside down, but I may be missing something.

Fifth, this must be a “just transition.” This will require “support for communities who (sic) have historically been harmed first and most by the dirty energy economy,” as well as “retrofitting millions of buildings to conserve energy” and “actively restoring natural ecosystems.”

Sixth, the rights of indigenous peoples must be fully protected, although it’s not clear whether Native Americans will be allowed to develop coal, oil, and natural gas resources on their lands. My guess is they’ll be able to apply for compensation.

Finally, the Green New Deal must not protect fossil fuel producers from legal liability and cannot include “market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, [or] carbon capture and storage.”

As Ebell correctly observes, this Green New Deal should be called the Back to the Dark Ages Manifesto.

And as such one would normally conclude that no responsible environmental organization or mainstream Democratic Party politician would embrace it, but alas these are not normal times.

The summary above was embraced by six-hundred twenty-six organizations, some of them major environmental groups, that formed a coalition behind a letter sent to Members of the House of Representatives on January 10th detailing their demands for what must and must not be included in a Green New Deal.

Many conservative observers have focused on the Green New Deal’s massive estimated cost, such as the eye-popping PJ Media analysis based on a new report from Power the Future, the Green New Deal proposed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would cost more than 8,000 times as much as President Donald Trump’s border wall.

The Green New Deal will cost approximately $49.109 trillion in the first ten years, enough to fund Trump’s border wall 8,616 times over. The president is requesting $5.7 billion for the wall.

PJ Media calculated the cost of the Green New Deal by integrating each of the cost aspects involved in a Power the Future analysis and calculating their cost for the U.S. over about ten years.

The staggering cost is certainly one reason to oppose the Green New Deal, but there is also the staggering social dislocation that would be created by such a society-wide experiment in social engineering.

You can’t run a steel mill with a windmill, nor can you guarantee that the projected Green New Deal jobs would be created where the old fossil fuel-dependent jobs were located.

Think about it: If fossil fuels are outlawed, then the vast regions of the Appalachian coal belt, the oil fields of Texas and Louisiana, the oil fields of North Dakota and the western coal fields would lose their economic underpinnings.

The heavy industry-dependent areas of the Midwest and what’s left in the Rust Belt that stretches from the East Coast around the Great Lakes to Minnesota would likewise be devastated.

The only way such a massive project as the Green New Deal could be accomplished would be through the forced relocation of millions of workers and their families in a massive societal restructuring akin to the forced collectivization of Russian agriculture after the Soviet Revolution of 1917 or Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward economic restructuring of Communist China.

Both of those society-wide socialist restructurings were economic, cultural and humanitarian disasters that killed millions in the name of creating a more equitable society and were eventually abandoned when they didn’t work and left millions of their intended beneficiaries starving and without employment.

That the Green New Deal would be embraced by naive millennials should surprise no one, but that it is getting traction with mainstream Democratic Party leaders and established environmental groups shows just how quickly and shockingly far Leftward the Democratic Party has moved in the Age of Trump. Serious people can and should debate and strive to achieve a healthy environment for all Americans. However, embracing the errors of the Communist Russia and China in the name of a Green New Deal is not serious because the coercive measures necessary to make it work will never be accepted by the vast majority of Americans.

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Allan MacRae comments:

Farmer wrote:

“My rule of thumb is: if it is forced to cost more, it likely has a larger environmental footprint. (more labor, energy expended, natural resources used, regulatory oversight, etc.)”

This is a valid general assumption. I wrote something like this years ago re “green” energy.

Everything we manufacture in the modern world requires energy (incidentally, ~85% of global primary energy is fossil fuels, unchanged in decades, and the rest is nuclear and hydro, and green energy is less than 2%, despite many trillions in squandered subsidies).

When something costs more, it is generally because it requires more energy to produce and ship - it also generally produces more CO2 emissions.

When a product requires a lifetime subsidy, like wind power, solar power, corn ethanol and other biofuels, it probably consumes more energy that it produces and also increases CO2 emissions rather than reducing them. Green scams can hide their greater CO2 emissions with their standard misinformation, but they cannot hide their greater costs.

Most green schemes are so poorly conceived that they not only cost more, they also increase CO2 emissions (FAKE pollution). They also increase REAL pollution, especially solar power and battery power schemes, due to the waste products of manufacture and scrapping of solar power hardware and batteries.

So my general rule is:

GREATER COST = [MORE ENERGY INPUT] ...AND… [MORE CO2 EMISSIONS] ...AND… [MORE REAL POLLUTION] ...AND… [LESS EFFICIENT USE OF SCARCE GLOBAL RESOURCES].

Science and technology are complicated, and most politicians are too uneducated to understand even the basics. They have routinely imposed green energy schemes that are not green and produce little useful (dispatchable) energy. They have also banned products and replaced them with environmentally worse products. They are susceptible to bribes, especially to support their re-election - and many of these people would be unemployable outside of politics. All too often, we are governed by scoundrels and imbeciles.