Let’s have yet another go at trying to apply the scientific method to the subject of causation of climate change. This is just basic logic, and not that complicated. We can do it.
As simple and basic as this is, you will shortly see that the agglomeration of all of the world’s leading “climate scientists” can’t figure it out. They are completely lost and befuddled. Check me and see if I’m wrong.
The proposition we are addressing is the one for which you see a constant drumbeat of advocacy. It runs something like, “the climate is changing, and we are the cause.” OK, nobody denies that the climate is changing; but how about the “we are the cause” part? What is the proof?
Let’s apply the scientific method. We start with the basic maxim that “correlation does not prove causation.” Instead, causation is established by disproof of all relevant alternative ("null") hypotheses.
Everybody knows how this works from drug testing. We can’t prove that drug A cures disease X by administering drug A a thousand times and observing that disease X almost always goes away. Disease X might have gone away for other reasons, or on its own. Even if we administer drug A a million times, and disease X almost always goes away, we have only proved correlation, not causation. To prove causation, we must disprove the null hypothesis by testing drug A against a placebo. The placebo represents the null hypothesis that something else (call it “natural factors") is curing disease X. When drug A is significantly more effective at curing disease X than the placebo, then we have disproved the null hypothesis, and established, at least provisionally, the effectiveness of drug A.
Back to climate change. The hypothesis is “humans are causing significant climate change.” An appropriate null hypothesis would be “observed climate change can be fully explained by some combination of natural factors.” How might you test this?
The Upcoming Biden Administration Calls For Extreme Levels Of Reality Denial
December 18, 2020/ Francis Menton
The Upcoming Biden Administration Calls For Extreme Levels Of Reality Denial
As discussed here in a recent post, being a climate “believer” requires basic refusal to deal with the real world as it exists. And no matter how crazy it has been up to now, with the incoming Biden administration, get ready for the make believe to move up to a whole new level.
Can we actually change the weather by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars into windmills and solar panels? That’s what we are all now going to pretend. Kim Strassel sees where it’s going in today’s Wall Street Journal:
[I]t’s all about green. Climate will be the driving priority of this White House - Mr. Biden’s make-nice to progressives. He’ll have a climate envoy ( John Kerry ), a climate czar ( Gina McCarthy ), and climate obsessives leading every department ( Janet Yellen, Pete Buttigieg, Jennifer Granholm ).
Where Is The Criticism Of China From Environmentalists?
December 14, 2020/ Francis Menton
You undoubtedly are aware that the international environmental movement has almost entirely been taken over and consumed by the climate change scare; and you also cannot help but be aware of the constant drumbeat of attacks by environmentalists on the U.S. government, particularly under President Trump, for its failure to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to “save the planet.”
At the same time, you are a reader of the Manhattan Contrarian. Therefore, you know that China is not only not reducing its own carbon emissions, but instead has well more than tripled them over the past twenty years (during which period U.S. emissions have declined modestly by about 15%); and today China is in the midst of a new round of massive expansion of its fossil fuel energy generation capacity, particularly with respect to the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal…
So then surely the major environmental organizations must be coming down hard on China? Wrong.
Note see this excellent library of 27 stories on scientific fraud that Buddy has compiled.
October 05, 2020/ Francis Menton
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time—Part XXVII
It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite Link.
There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work.
Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past government climate data to create an impression of warming that does not exist in the data as originally reported.
Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points.
My colleagues and I have given many lectures about the myths, misconceptions and outright lies in the global warming arena the last few decades. After an hour of graphs, charts and pictures detailing how a tiny trace gas, carbon dioxide, has no relationship to whatever warming and cooling or weather extremes has occurred we get the inevitable statement from someone in the audience.
“How can you deny that man made global warming and its effects are real when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that it is true?”
At that point we have to explain that the 97 percent figure is not what it appears to be. It is a convenient fiction to imply a consensus.
It is now the rule in the schools. Our students are not being taught the scientific method. In the classroom they are taught what to think and not how to think.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE PHONEY CONSENSUS
The scientific method does not involve a poll or vote by scientists (that is in the realm of politics where you vote on a law or candidate), but validation of a theory with facts.
Michael Crichton, PhD, MD, famous author, producer, screenwriter and lecturer often talked about claims of a consensus.
“Historically the claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrel; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled”. “Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus… Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.”
The fact that a VP and a failed presidential candidate who had a D in the only science class he ever took produced the movie An Inconvenient Truth seen by our children numerous times in schools even in gym class should raise eyebrows. It did in the UK where the courts ruled in order for the film to be shown that teachers must make clear that the film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument, and if teachers present the film without making this plain they may be in breach of the 1996 Education Act and guilty of political indoctrination. They required the eleven most egregious inaccuracies had to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.
WHAT DO SCIENTISTS REALLY THINK?
There have been many polls and declarations that demonstrate a large percentage of real scientists believe in climate change BUT that natural factors are the primary driver.
Climatology wasn’t a recognized specialty or profession even at colleges when I first taught weather and climate in the 1970s into the early 1980s. It was mostly a small part of introductory classes on weather or in geography or geology courses. When climate change became part of an anti fossil fuel agenda and big money suddenly appeared, teachers never trained in climate suddenly became ‘climate scientists’. Environmental sciences emerged as a career path.
The UN, politicians, industry and the mainstream and on-line media would want you to believe that all scientists have now seen the light, that there is a consensus. That is not the case. Most honest scientist know so. Many are forced into silence or if they vocalize their dissent, find their careers endangered or even destroyed. Still many when past the stage of their career where they can speak the truth or when they can do so anonymously, will do so.
A Global Warming Petition was signed by 31,487 scientists including 9,029 with PHDs in their fields. The petition states that: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth”.
1100 Climate Realists signed ‘’The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change” from 40 countries demanding an end to climate hysteria. 1000+ International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims to the U.S. Senate, 300+ Eminent Scientists Reject U.N. Climate Change Treaty (Paris Accord). A recent survey found 1350 peer review papers questioning global warming and 1000 papers believing cooling has begun. See my team’s effort to fact-check popular alarmist claims here. We have many other peer review papers disprove the theory.
Scientists are aware of the failures too and now have proposed 54 excuses and counting as to why their models have failed. See this interesting series on the Great Scientific Fraud here.
There are many well-educated people who do not agree with the survey and its 97% figure. In a 2011 Scientific American opinion poll on the state of climate science provided the eye-opening results cast by their “scientifically literate” readership. With a total of 5190 respondents, a consensus of 81.3% think the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone to group-think, with a political agenda” and 75% think climate change is caused by solar variation or natural processes vs. 21% who think it is due to greenhouse gases from human activity. 65% think we should do nothing about climate change since “we are powerless to stop it,” and the same percentage think science should stay out of politics. When asked, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”.76.7% said “nothing.” Scientific American removed the poll when pressured by environmental groups.
In a 2013 Forbes article, it was reported only 36 percent of earth scientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show earth scientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists.
Even a global UN survey of the public, received over 9.7 million votes and found in prioritizing what should be focused on, action on climate change finished last.
The first quoted source was an online survey that was published in 2009 by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman from the University of Illinois. The survey was sent to 10,257 scientists to, which 3,146 scientists responded to.
There were two primary questions in the survey. The first “When compared to pre-1800 levels, do you think mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? ”
History has recorded a prolonged global cold era know as “The Little Ice Age” that lasted from about 1400 to 1850 AD. Since that time the global average temperature has risen. I know of no meteorologist, climatologist or anyone involved in the study of the earth’s temperature, who would argue this point.
Question number two asked “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
BUT what constitutes “human activity”? The burning of fossil fuels to make energy is one. The changing of land surfaces to make cities, farmland and deforestation is “human activity” that can change temperature as well. Changing mean temperature can be accomplished by changing the environment around a climate recording station. This is also “human activity”. As rural stations are increasingly surrounded by urban sprawl, roads and buildings, the temperature of the site will warm due to the “Urban Heat Island (UHI)” effect. This has nothing to due with fossil fuel. The results from the survey do not address just what constitutes “human activity”. A “yes” response to question two implies the responder is referring to fossil fuels but that is not necessarily the case. It is however, what the survey likely wanted to convey.
Question number two also does not address what the word “significant” means to each individual respondent. What constitutes significant can be very different from person to person.
The 97% figure from the on-line survey comes from a whittling down of the accepted number of responses from 3,146 to 79. The 79 scientists are those that said they have recently published 50% of their papers in the area of climate change. Of these, 76 of 79 answered “risen” to questions one (96.2%). How this number is not 100% was a surprise. As to question two, 75 of 77 answered ‘yes” (97.4%).
An attempt at a more rigorous approach to confirm the 97% number followed and failed. Cook et al. (2013) attempted to categorize 11,944 abstracts [brief summaries] of papers (not entire papers) to their level of endorsement of AGW. They found 7930 (66%) held no position on AGW, while only 64 papers (0.5% of the total) explicitly endorsed humans are the primary (50%+) as the cause. This was 97% of those who explicitly identified a cause. A later analysis by Legates et al. (2013) found there to be only 41 papers (0.3%) that supported this definition.
Cook et al. (2013) was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) which conveniently has multiple outspoken alarmist scientists on its editorial board (e.g. Peter Gleick and Stefan Rahmstorf) where the paper likely received substandard “pal-review” instead of the more rigorous peer-review. The paper has since been refuted five times in the scholarly literature by Legates et al. (2013), Tol (2014a), Tol (2014b), Dean (2015) and Tol (2016).
All the other “97% consensus” studies: e.g. Doran & Zimmerman (2009), Anderegg et al. (2010) and Oreskes (2004) have been refuted by peer-review.
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AN UPHILL BATTLE
Alarmists have the advantage of virtually all the massive funding for climate change research ($1.65Byear) and they have a huge ‘social support’ group of
(1) Agenda driven or ratings driven journalists, environmentalists and corporations that have realized green is their favorite color and see this as a way to keep green paper flowing into their coffers and pockets
(2) Traders and major market firms licking their chops at the prospects of big time money from alternative energy companies that have realized this is the vector to bigger profits and
(3) Politicians and political activists who see it as a way to accomplish ulterior goals about changing society and increasing their powerbase.
Some Saw This Coming
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” And, “he urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.” H.L. Mencken
Well before the climate change scare started, we were warned in 1961:
“… [In] the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central ... complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government ... the solitary inventor ... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields ... the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
- President Eisenhower in his Farewell address
His words have been proven remarkably prophetic. Look at the real motivations in their own words.
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- The Club of Rome Premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations.
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“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
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“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony...climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
- Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
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“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
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“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
- Emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
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“The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to compliance.”
- Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray
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“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”
NOAA’s Administrator Jane Lubchenko, when she was president of AAAS in 1999
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“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system… This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.” In simpler terms, replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled centralized, One World government and economic control.
- UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres
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“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. “It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
-IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer
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“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First
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“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
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The Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” (nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy) “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,”
-Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.
The universities, professional societies and even congress has taken serious and alarming steps to eliminate (punish) doubters and public opinion. They attack any of their own, who speak out. That includes formerly outspoken environmentalists like Dr. Patrick Moore, co founder of Greenpeace and Michael Shellenberger formerly Time Magazine’s ‘Hero of the Environment’ whose apology for the false scare which was published by Forbes but then forced to be removed. They even have threatened to use RICO against any vocal doubters that remain. See why attention to this is important for our future here.
A study released earlier this year shows that the low-lying Maldives - a small archipelagic country in the Indian Ocean, long thought to be at risk from catastrophic sea-level rise associated with global warming - has actually grown in geographic size on a majority of its islands.
The study, done by Dr. Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle in France, showed that 97 percent of the country’s islands either grew (59 percent) or have not changed (38 percent) since 2005. The study would seem to confirm Duvat’s own findings from 2018 when she concluded:
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea level rise.”
Less than 3 percent of the nation’s 186 islands showed any decrease in size in the period studied.
According to Duvat, land reclamation projects drove island expansion on 93.5 percent of the inhabited islands of the Maldives, while a combination of land reclamation and engineered structures such as breakwaters and groins were responsible for much of the growth of the resort islands.
In other words, unless sea level rise is immediate and catastrophically high, mankind has the ability to adjust to it. We’ve already seen this ability in low-lying places such as the Netherlands and Japan where low-lying country is protected by sea walls and underground discharge tunnels. A slow, steady sea level rise, as is predicted even by most climate alarmists, should be no trouble to adjust to, given even a little time.
The type of reclamation in use by the Maldives is not without environmental consequences according to Duvat: “The Malidivian island model of ‘reclamation-fortification’ has detrimental impacts on the environment while also questioning the future capacity of the Maldives to face a hard path of increasing risks.”
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But you can literally say that about any human engineering project, including building large scale wind and solar farms. Anything we build adversely affects some environment somewhere. The trade off should be the key when discussing these things. Are the Maldives better off by reinforcing their coastlines at the risk to some fish habitat and natural beaches? No doubt, most of the nations 400,000 residents or 1.8 million annual tourists would say, ‘yes’.
Duvat’s conclusions also concur with that of the University of Aucklund of 2018. which studied the tiny island nation of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean, concluding that the atoll nation actually grew in size by approximately 180 acres - roughly the size of California’s Disneyland - from the early 1970’s to 2017.
In the case of Tuvalu, researchers concluded that the islands’ growth was a natural occurrence with waves and storms depositing sand and rocks on the shores - not just human intervention.
The nation of Tuvalu is significant since it was featured prominently in carbon credit salesman Al Gore’s 2006 An Inconvenient Truth, a science fiction film masquerading as science. In fact, in that film Gore wrongly asserted that, “the citizens of these island nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”
Yet, despite Mr. Gore’s dire warnings, Tuvalu remains a small but vibrant nation. The island nation’s population remains around 11,000 people and there is currently no refugee crisis, although a small number of Tuvalu citizens have relocated to New Zealand.
Male, the island capital of the Maldives, where most of the nation’s population is located. Dr. Morner’s research of the sea level record of the past 2,600 years shows a significant sea level fall in the 1970s and no signs of any ongoing rise
As for the Maldives, the people there are investing in their future rather than being frightened into fleeing in fear as climate alarmists would have them do. The country has built five new airports in the past two years that are set to supply dozens of new luxury resorts with tourists from all over the world.
Without apocalyptic fear mongering, climate alarmists have little actual evidence to suggest we must immediately change our ways and get rid of all fossil fuels for the planet’s sake. More than three decades into their catastrophic predictions of sea-level rise causing a (pardon the pun) flood of climate refugees from low-lying island nations, those island nations appear to be thriving just fine. Perhaps it’s just their sea-level predictions that are faulty, or maybe their entire premise that man is causing uncontrollable warming of the Earth is flawed.
Europe’s main science academies reveal their anti-growth agenda
Europe faces a catastrophic economic crisis and tens of millions of redundancies as a result of the political measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, there is growing tension among policy makers between saving the economy and economic growth and saving Europe’s costly climate agenda.
In her speech to the United Nations last year, the eco-socialist activist Greta Thunberg denounced world leaders for their main interest in what she called “the fairy tale of eternal economic growth.” Her anti-growth attack didn’t come as a surprise. After all, critical observers have always known that this kind of radical climate activism is driven by an anti-capitalist agenda.
Now Europe’s main scientific body, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (which comprises of the National Academies of Science of all EU Member States, Norway, Switzerland and UK), has followed in Greta’s footsteps, hitting out against policy makers and governments who prioritise economic growth.
“Generation Greta gets it. Our focus should be on well-being and welfare, but our economic system puts all focus on growth and GDP which adds fuel to the climate and biodiversity crises.”
That’s how the European Academies Science Advisory Council press release highlights the main take of its report which calls for “‘transformational’ change that is necessary if policy-makers and their public (sic) are to support the conclusions of the advocates of change.”
The capture of Europe’s scientific institutions and organisations by degrowth ideologues is a tragic reflection on the state of green ideology which is bringing institutional science ever more into disrepute.
Focus on GDP and economic growth is unhelpful for the climate, European group says
Tracking happiness could be the key to beating climate change, a group of European scientists has said.
The report by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, chaired by British chemist and former civil servant Dr Michael Norton, argues that measuring GDP has led to rampant consumption and financial growth which is destroying the planet and not making us happier.
They therefore suggest replacing the widely-used wealth measure with “indicators of human well-being”.
Co-author Anders Wijkman, a former politician and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said focus on economic growth and GDP “adds fuel to the climate and biodiversity crises”.
Current “incremental” measures are not enough to head off “dangerous” climate change and more fundamental shifts are needed, the report argues, criticising political leaders for caving to business interests in a quest to maintain growth.
Instead policymakers should recognise that current consumption levels are unsustainable if environmental damage is to be mitigated, the group said.
The call is at odds with the stance of European countries including the UK, with ministers insisting that continued economic growth is possible alongside a phase-out of fossil fuels, through investment in new industries including renewable energy.
The group said their conclusions “challenge the social and political paradigm of at least the past 70 years where leaders have campaigned on the basis of continuing improvement in the traditional economy, with science and technology expected to allow economic growth to be indefinitely sustained.”
Must see Tony Heller on the data manipulation by NOAA and NASA.
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During the cantankerous September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure - about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites.
Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the Trump tax cuts, but has refused to say whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, Second Amendment self-defense, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or adding Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington DC as new (Democrat) states.
Like Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare, he wants us to vote for him, so we can find out what his positions are.
When he’s in California or Manhattan, he says he’ll ban fracking - which he claims to support when he’s in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he needs rural and blue-collar voters who support and benefit greatly from this amazing technology. However, Mr. Biden does say he will put controlling Earth’s climate at the center of US foreign policy. So he strongly supports the Green New Deal (GND), which would completely replace fossil fuels with “clean, green” electricity and biofuel energy by 2035.
GND proponents want us to believe this can be done quickly, easily, affordably, ecologically, sustainably and painlessly - almost with the wave of a magic wand. Not a chance. Those in power would undoubtedly protect their privileged status. But the GND would control and pummel the jobs, lives, living standards, savings, personal choices and ecological heritage of rural, poor, minority, elderly and working classes.
Dependable coal and natural gas power plants will be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power; gasoline-powered vehicles with electric models. That’s obvious.
But our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids provide over 80% of the energy that makes America’s jobs, lives and living standards possible. Locking them in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that are far less apparent, and have (deliberately?) received little media attention.
In 2018, America’s fossil fuels generated about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. But almost two-thirds of the nation’s non-exported natural gas served industrial, commercial and residential needs - including factories, hospital emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and tens of millions of US homes. That’s equivalent to another 2.7 billion MWh.
The nation’s 65 million cars, light trucks, buses, semi-trailers, motor homes, tractors, backhoes and other vehicles consumed the gasoline and diesel equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh.
Altogether, that’s nearly 7.5 billion MWh that the Green New Deal would have to replace by 2035!
Even assuming the United States and world could mine, process and transport enough metals and minerals - and manufacture and transport all the components and finished equipment to make this happen - this brave new all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, tens of thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of vehicle batteries, billions of backup energy storage batteries, thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines, and billions of tons of concrete!
The GND would turn our Midlands - what elites denigrate as flyover country - into vast energy colonies. Millions of acres of farmland, wildlife habitat and scenic areas would be blanketed by industrial wind, solar and battery facilities, and power lines to electricity-hungry towns and cities. Windswept ocean vistas and sea lanes would be plagued by towering turbines. Birds, bats and other wildlife would disappear.
With mining still under assault in the USA, the metals, minerals, components and equipment would come mostly from China or Chinese companies in Africa, using vast quantities of fossil fuels, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws. This smells of slavery and racism - making us complicit in perpetuating it, and making it increasingly difficult for the United States to criticize or challenge China on human rights, pollution, military aggression or territorial expansion.
The GND would also mean ripping out, and throwing out, the natural gas appliances you now have, replacing them with electric models, and installing rapid charging systems for your cars. That will mean upgrading household, neighborhood and national electrical systems, to handle the extra loads.
Oil and natural gas are also feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers ... and plastics for computers, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. Under the GND, wed have to shut down those US-based industries, import feed stocks for them, or turn hundreds of millions of acres into biofuel plantations.
Up to 10 million high-pay petroleum, petrochemical and manufacturing jobs would be lost - with many replaced by low-pay, temporary or short-term jobs hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling and landfilling wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The GND would cost tens of trillions of dollars!
GND ringleader California wants the entire country to emulate its policies. Its families and businesses already pay the highest electricity prices in the continental USA - and are getting hammered repeatedly by blackouts. Now the state has mandated electric cars, cooking and heating. No more natural gas. How its legislators expect to generate all that extra electricity and avoid more blackouts, no one knows.
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses used to paying 7, 9 or 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for 24/7/365 electricity better brace themselves for rude shocks. Under the GND, you’ll be paying 14, 18, 22 cents per kWh, as they do in green US states ‘ or even 35 US cents per kWh, as they do in Germany. You’ll also be using twice as much electricity, and probably experiencing repeated power interruptions.
Get used to having electricity when it’s available, rather than when you need it, however “essential” your business services or family needs might be. How you will survive, whether your job will disappear, whether you will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating, is anyone’s guess.
A week of cloudy weather will really reduce solar output - and wind turbines generate roughly zero electricity on the hottest and most frigid days. Be careful where you live or need to recharge your EV.
As to all those electric vehicles, a basic $39,000 Model 3 Tesla sedan has a battery module that weighs some 1,200 pounds and gets around 250 miles on a charge. Just don’t use the heater or AC, don’t take long family trips, and don’t get caught in a blizzard, or a traffic jam trying to escape a roaring forest fire.
How many tons of batteries a bus, semi-truck or mining excavator would require, where you’d put them, and how many hours a day you’d waste recharging them, are other important considerations. Perhaps Mr. Biden or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has the answers.
The Obama Administration sent a heavily armed SWAT team into Gibson Guitar offices over a phony Endangered Species Act violation. Democrats refuse to condemn BLM and Antifa mob violence, arson and looting. How a Biden-Harris-AOC Deep State and its allies might respond to organized or even spontaneous resistance to Green New Deal dictates and impacts is pretty easy to imagine. So is their response to cities, counties and states declaring themselves “sanctuaries” to GND or gun control decrees.
Keep in mind, too: This entire GND energy, economic and living standards “transformation” is being justified by claims that we face a “climate emergency” and “ongoing ravages of climate change.”
It’s all a gigantic Climate Hustle. There is no climate emergency. Humans cannot control Earth’s climate and weather. Fossil fuel emissions have negligible effects. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the miracle molecule that makes plant, human and animal life possible. Climate change and extreme weather have been “real” throughout history. What we are seeing today is in no way unprecedented.
Green New Dealers would bring us, our country and our planet enormous pain for no gain - except that they would get more money, power and control.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
