RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/06/a-remedial-les

I am a mathematics teacher in a well-to-do school.  Next year will be my fiftieth year in the profession.  I am well known around the school as someone who hasn’t fallen for the CO2 swindle, although I have no problem with the notion that the various climates around the earth are changing in various ways.  Being a mathematics teacher, the notion the mainstream media runs, that the earth has “a climate”, appals me.  How can we can “average” the multitude of climates around the earth and come up with “the climate”? It does not compute.

I often come across students and teachers who express concern over climate change and the need for humanity to do something about it.  I always begin such conversations with the question, “What’s the problem?”  They always, eventually, get down to the fact that it’s carbon “pollution” and how we must stop burning fossil fuels and embrace renewables in order to save the planet. Again, its the MSM spin. My next question is how much CO2 is in the atmosphere?  I have yet to come across anyone at school, when asked that question, who knows that it’s a bit above 400 ppm.  After informing them of this particular fact, I ask if they know how low the CO2 concentration can fall  before life on earth ceases.  Again, I have yet to come across anyone at school who knows that once it drops to about 180 ppm, we are in trouble.

My third question after that is this: if 400 ppm is too much and 180 ppm too little, how much CO2 is just right?  Again, no one has been able to answer this, as no one on the planet knows the answer.  I then try to present students (adults have usually stopped listening by that stage) with some perspective on 400 ppm. I ask them to think of a million molecules of atmosphere as a million one-dollar coins placed adjacent to each other in a square.  The square would be 25 metres by 25 metres, about the size of a school’s small gymnasium. The 400 ppm of CO2, if represented by those dollar coins, would make up a square 50 cm by 50 cm. What’s more, since humanity is responsible for only about three per cent of the CO2 in the atmosphere, the human contribution to those one million coins would be 12 coins.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-6-12-on-the-promise-of-green-jobs

Sometimes it seems like the biggest selling point advanced in favor of “renewable energy” is the promise of what are called “green jobs.” What are those? Proponents are often vague, but I suppose that the green jobs largely consist of the work of building, installing, and maintaining the vast future farms of windmills and solar panels, and related infrastructure like transmission lines. Since most of these jobs involve some combination of strenuous labor in remote areas and/or a high level of skill, of course they will be very high-paying jobs. Millions of them. What’s not to like about that?

President Obama was an early arrival at the “green jobs” party, tossing out a “plan to create 5 million new green jobs” as part of his 2008 presidential campaign. (Politifact in November 2016 struggles to figure out how many of those jobs ever got created, and if so, where they may be.) You won’t be surprised to learn that Obama’s ideas pretty much all consisted of some variety of government subsidies, programs, mandates, tax credits, “investments,” expenditures, and the like, e.g., a new “job training program for clean technologies,” a new federal “renewable portfolio standard” to force utilities to switch to wind and/or solar generation, extension of the “production tax credit” for wind and solar, and so on and on.

More recently “green jobs” promoters have further upped the ante. In January of this year, Francie Diep of Pacific Standard quoted the Center for American Progress as predicting that a federal “investment” of just $800 billion per year (!) toward cutting carbon emissions to zero would create 6.8 million net new jobs. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization (part of the UN) put out a study in 2018 predicting that implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement would create some 24 million “net” green new jobs worldwide by 2030. It all sounds like a near-infinite bounty of new wealth.