“Climate alarmism cannot be understood outside of the long-standing, long-debunked Malthusian view of man as a market failure, a planetary failure. The last half-century’s litany of alarm marches on, with one failed prognostication morphing into another.”
“The Planet Doesn’t Have Time for This,” screams the headline of a recent New York Times Sunday Review. “President Trump is in charge at a crucial moment for dealing with the climate crisis,” the subtitle reads. “We may never recover.”
The article by Bill McKibben begins:
President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people.
and ends:
…We can hope other world leaders will pick up some of the slack.
“Armed with Gore’s utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president’s 20-room home and pool house devoured … more than 20 times the national average….”
“‘I appreciate the solar panels,’ [Drew Johnson of TCPR] said, ‘but he also has natural gas lanterns in his yard, a heated pool, and an electric gate. While I appreciate that he’s switching out some light bulbs, he is not living the lifestyle that he advocates.'”
– Jake Tapper, “Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’? A $30,000 Utility Bill.” ABC News, February 2007.
Neo-Malthusians who profess the need for government to save the world from peaceful consumers and producers face some hard realities in their lemming-like war against fossil fuels.…
… Dr. [J. Elliott] Campbell and his colleagues have discovered that in the last century, plants have been growing at a rate far faster than at any other time in the last 54,000 years. Writing in the journal Nature, they report that plants are converting 31 percent more carbon dioxide into organic matter than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The increase is because of the carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere, which fertilizes the plants, Dr. Campbell said.
– Carl Simmer, A Global Greening, New York Times, April 5, 2017.
There are benefits, not only costs, to the human influence on climate. Photosynthesis from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is part of this.
Expect the benefits of CO2 to show up in a recalculation of the “social costs” of the enhanced greenhouse effects, which will dramatically lower the Obama-era estimates that looked at (exaggerated) costs, not benefits.…