“Voters and citizens all must tell Tom Steyer, the moneyed Left Foundations, taxpayer-inebriated scientists, green-energy cronies, Left politicians, and Crony Republicans that human-need philanthropy should replace the politics of pessimism and waste. It is time to end the futile climate crusade.”
– Robert Bradley, “Doubling Down on Climate Alarmism,” Forbes.com, December 1, 2014.
The free-market energy space these days is very crowded, quite unlike the old days when just a few of us were battling Big Government, Big Environmentalism, and Big Cronyism (think Enron). As one of the veterans, my blogs and op-eds now compete against a number of new voices, beginning with Alex Epstein and continuing with “America’s Voice for Energy” Marita Noon, and others. (Marlo Lewis, then as now, stands above as scholar-blogger.)
And so this veteran must pat himself on the back when breaking through the busy blogosphere. This occurred a few years back at an online debate at The Economist against a group of Greens where I challenged the premise of this proposition: This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels. After some back-and-forth, the online vote supported the negative.
Now to the present. I have a monthly energy column at Forbes.com, titled Political Energy. My first column in October 2011, Most Green Energy Projects Are Thinly Veiled Exercises In Crony Capitalism, received 1,252 views. My next-to-last column, Bad Science, Worse Policy, also on the anthropogenic climate-change debate, has received around 5,500 views, better than average.
But my latest entry, Doubling Down on Climate Alarmism, one week old today, has surpassed 35,000 views, more than my other posts this year combined. Not sure what caused the spike, but it must be something!
The post follows (with a link to the rest of the Forbes article):
Doubling Down on Climate Alarmism
This week, United Nations representatives are meeting in Lima, Peru in hopes of crafting an agreement that will limit global greenhouse emissions and combat the (nonexistent) problem of rising worldwide temperatures.
This comes on the heels of the recent climate pact between the United States and China aimed to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
While these events may be cause for celebration amongst green activists and the Obama Administration, for the average American, they are just two more misspent efforts by a closed-minded political elite in a world with real, here-and-now problems.
In fact, the toothless climate accord between the world’s two largest CO2 emitters has been described as “a promise in a rented tuxedo” where China “crossed its coal-fired heart.” The United States gets the shaft and China the coal, another journalist lamented.
The electorate is scarcely interested in climate alarmism and “climate action.” They are opposed to the Democratic Party’s anti-fossil-fuel agenda. If the multi-billion-dollar propaganda effort by Left foundations and government were to dwindle, the climate issue would fade away.
Falsified Alarmism
The United States/China pact and the UN meeting in South America are little more than desperate attempts to keep the climate agenda going in an energy-hungry, fossil-fuel world. Consumers are choosing oil, gas, and coal over politically correct, economically inferior substitutes. But in the intellectual/government/pundit sphere, a witch’s brew of bad science and Gruber salesmanship has turned an intellectual cause into a fringe religion — and self-defeating politics.
For decades, climate campaigners have warned that, unless we cut CO2 emissions rapidly and drastically, environmental devastation will be just around the corner. Like the running-out-of-oil predictions since the 1860s, the running-out-of-livable-climate (“tipping point“) meme of the last 25 years has been repeatedly falsified.
President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren, for example, refuses to disavow his 1980s prediction that by 2020, a billion people could perish from famine induced by man-made climate change. Holdren, going down with the Obama ship, now manufactures fringe analyses as mainstream science.
Al Gore has gone quiet on his prediction five years ago that the North Pole could be ice free during the summer months as early as…earlier this year. Instead, as one scientist recently reported, “It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.”
Countless examples exist where climate change is blamed for all-bad-things. One might think that only global cooling could save the world. As it is, the natural warm up since the mid-nineteenth century, the end of the Little Ice Age, is climate change that all can applaud.