“Could both sides of the climate debate just agree that it is time for resiliency before the fact and adaptation after the fact in the face of weather extremes, whatever the cause? Alex Epstein, meet Michael Mann. Michael Man, meet Alex Epstein.”
On LinkedIn, I reposted Bjorn Lomborg’s “We could stop scaring people witless with climate exaggeration,” and added the comment:
Is there any good reason for climate exaggeration–particularly to the mentally weak prone to ‘climate anxiety’? Is this a good thing even to the climate activists?
One Benjamin Silverstone responded:
The mentally weak prone to “climate anxiety”? That is the most insulting, bigoted thing I have ever heard. Check yourself Mr Bradley, look long and hard and never use the term mentally weak try and support your argument.
I replied:
…Exaggeration and failed doomist predictions mark the climate debate.
“’I’m a businessman. I’ll take the [government green] money, that’s all I care about… I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here’.” – James Quigley, quoted in Politico ‘s “Power Switch” (below)
In the mid-19th century, Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, a political economist, wrote:
Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Every one is, more or less, for profiting by the labors of others. No one would dare to express such a sentiment; he even hides it from himself.
The Frenchman added:
…When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
“To tackle the climate crisis, lower energy costs, and secure energy independence….” (General Preamble)
Kamala “climate light” Harris, as a campaigner, will not say that climate change is an “existential crisis” (much less yell it as the alarmists want). Harris rebuffs the notion that she would ban hydraulic fractionation with natural gas, reversing her previous pronouncements. She also states that electric cars (EVs) will not be mandated for drivers, backing away from a Biden Administration goal. Finally, Harris speaks little about the Green New Deal in general.
She is trying to get elected in the face of energy exceptionalism, which is the opposite of the Green New Deal. But her vagueness allows the major themes of ’24 Democratic Party Platform to be controlling.
The energy/climate narrative in the 91-page document does not include energy in Chapter Three: Lowering Costs.…