What Will It Take To End Anti-Greenhouse Gas Insanity? Francis Menton
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-15-what-will-it-take-to-end-anti-greenhouse-gas-insanity
It was nearly six years ago, in one of the very early posts on this blog, that I wrote as to the global warming scam, “[E]ven as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.” At the time, world temperatures had failed to rise in accordance with alarmist predictions for about 15 years running, and I still had the naive idea that the politics of this issue ultimately would follow the scientific method; in other words, that the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused warming would inevitably be forced to face the test of empirical evidence. Over time, empirical evidence would accumulate. As it became more and more clear that the evidence failed to support the hypothesis, the whole thing would gradually fade away. But up to that point, as I reported in that April 2013 post, what was happening was closer to the opposite. Extremely weak or completely negative empirical evidence for the hypothesis only made the advocates more and more extreme in their demands for immediate transformation of the world economy to “save the planet.”
The intervening six years have seen the ongoing accumulation of considerably more evidence, essentially all of it negative to the catastrophic global warming hypothesis, but my faith that actual evidence could resolve the issue has been almost completely shattered. Massive alterations have been made to the world thermometer temperature records by US and UK bureaucrats — almost entirely to reduce early-year temperatures and thereby create an apparent warming trend far greater than exists in the raw data. I have covered this issue extensively in a now-twenty-two part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Meanwhile, every hurricane, tornado, drought, flood, or other damaging act of nature is presented by the progressive press as evidence of human-caused “climate change” — even as the actual occurrences of such events have been definitively shown to have no increasing trend over time. Actual evidence gets massively altered, buried and/or ignored.
And now here we are in 2019, and the demands of the anti-greenhouse gas activists have only become more shrill and strident. Exhibit A is the so-called Green New Deal, a call to end most or all GHG emissions by 2030 at a cost of maybe 100 trillion dollars or so. And we are treated to claims by seemingly serious elected officials that the world will end in 12 years if we do not follow these prescriptions. If mere adverse empirical evidence cannot end this insanity, what can?
Here’s what I think will put this to an end: the actual implementation by some jurisdictions of the activists’ preferred policies, all of which would impose massive costs on the people with no measurable impacts on world temperatures or the climate. The problem with expecting the scientific method to resolve this issue is that very few people have the time or inclination to follow empirical evidence of world temperatures to see if they are rising in accordance with predictions. Even fewer people are willing to get into the nitty gritty to evaluate alterations to the temperature data to see if they are legitimate. But almost everybody will notice immediately when their electricity bill gets tripled.
The process of imposing massive costs on the voting public in the name of saving the planet has been proceeding slowly in many places, and only very recently has this process started to face the beginnings of political blowback. For example, in Germany, the so-called Energiewende began in 2010, and over the ensuing near-decade has gradually brought consumer electricity prices in that country to about triple the US average, with minimal reductions in actual greenhouse gas emissions. Seven plus years into this, in the late-2017 elections, two climate skeptic parties (Free Democrats and Alliance for Germany) went from almost nothing to winning some 24.6% of the seats in the Bundestag. South Australia is an even more complex political situation, but they have also seen fanatic imposition of a “green” energy agenda, with vast increases in “renewable” electricity generation, the closing of coal plants, leading to several massive blackouts, and electricity prices also rising to about triple the US average. This has definitely become a major political issue. And just yesterday in Finland, a climate skeptic party called the Finns Party got 17.5% of the votes and 39 seats in parliamentary elections where the biggest establishment party (Social Democrats) got only 17.7% and 40 seats. Many sources report that the election was dominated by the Finns Party’s rallying cry of “climate hysteria.”
Here in my home city of New York, so far it has been all talk and not much action on the front of “fighting climate change” by forcibly suppressing greenhouse gas emissions. But that may all be about to change. A new omnibus package of “climate” bills has just been introduced in the City Council, seeking to go all in on every ridiculously expensive and completely ineffective policy you can think of, supposedly to “save the planet.” The Huffington Post has a big write-up here. Allegedly this monstrosity is going to come up for a vote as early as a week from today, April 22, aka “Earth Day.”
From the lead sponsor:
“This is about saving New York City,” Councilman Costa Constantinides, the Queens Democrat leading the effort. . . . “This is saving the city as we know it.”
This guy actually has the idea that he can stop bad weather or sea level rise or something by ordering the people of New York City (about 0.1% of the world’s population) to change their energy sources or use less energy or otherwise stop their sinning. How about some specifics?
The heart of the legislation is a measure requiring buildings of over 25,000 square feet ― the biggest source of carbon pollution in the city ― to install new windows, insulation and other retrofits to become more energy efficient. Starting in 2024, the legislation orders landlords to slash emissions 40% by 2030, and double the cuts by 2050.
Well, I have some experience as a building owner, and I can tell you that you can replace all the windows and insulate to your heart’s content, and you are not going to reduce your building’s energy usage by anything close to 40%, let alone 80%. In addition to which, most large buildings have long since made these upgrades. But hey, these are evil landlords, so we can just order them to do it, and it will happen.
And how about some other things we can order evil companies to do:
The full Climate Mobilization Act package goes further. One bill orders the city to complete a study over the next two years on the feasibility of closing all 24 oil- and gas-burning power plants in city limits and replacing them with renewables and batteries. Another establishes a renewable energy loan program. Two more require certain buildings to cover roofs with plants, solar panels, small wind turbines or a mix of the three. The last in this initial bunch tweaks the city’s building code to make it easier to build wind turbines.
These are some things with the real possibility of increasing our costs of electricity by big multiples. You might think I would strenuously oppose the bills, given that I am a designated guinea pig and victim for an experiment that can’t possibly end in anything other than abject failure. But you would be wrong. I say, let them try this nonsense, and the sooner and faster the better. That’s the only way that the inattentive multitudes will finally wake up. And, when electricity bills or gasoline prices or rents multiply by factors of three, or maybe five, then wake up they will. The insane politics of New York City might seem completely impervious to change, but that’s because the limits have not yet been tested. Going down this road could finally lead to a 180 degree reversal. I say, go for it!
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