Climate: The Real ‘Worrisome Trend’ (Part II: Policy and Intent)
By Joe D'Aleo -- May 12, 2016Who is pushing this end-of-hydrocarbon-energy to prevent an end-of-world-calamity agenda? The list is long and includes politicians and UN globalists (look up Agenda 21) who seek more power and control over every aspect of your life.
Scientists, environmentalists, green NGOs and corporations are all chasing the $1.5 trillion per year that feeds the climate crisis and renewable energy industry. The lengthy list also includes scientifically illiterate population-control socialists and Hollywood cause seekers, who are all supported by environmental journalists who never question any “green” causes or scare stories.
Many use the “precautionary principle” to justify drastic actions that perversely have truly drastic consequences, intended or unintended.
Bad Policy, Bad Impacts
Eco-fanaticism has already pummeled Europe. In the past ten years, the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 63 percent. Polling indicates that 38% of British households are cutting back essential purchases like food, to pay high and rising energy bills. Another 59% of homes are worried about how they will pay energy bills when the Paris accord is enforced.
Poor and middle class families are impacted worst of all.
Families and businesses in the “Blue States” in the Northeast already pay the highest electricity prices in the United States – twice that of some other states. The changes the EPA and this administration are pushing could double those rates – and the rates in other states. Followng are the top ten states (of the lower 48) for 2015’s average residential electricity costs (Source: EIA, May 2016. ).
The thousands of dollars that an average Northeastern family saved on gasoline and heating oil in 2015, thanks to fracking and drilling on private land, was truly welcomed as the only “raise” that many families got in many a year.
However, that too will be a memory, if the EPA’s plans are not blocked by the courts – or a President Trump. Moreover, if elected president, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both plan to eliminate fracking, as well as most conventional oil and gas drilling and production.
With a Hillary Clinton administration and newly Democrat Congress promising to kill fracking and eliminate, hyper-regulate and/or over-tax fossil fuels, energy costs per family would increase thousands of dollars a year. This happened in Europe when the greens took control.
Moreover, soaring energy prices ripple through the entire economy, affecting the cost of all goods and services – including products and services provided by factories, hospitals, schools, small businesses and the shipping of food and other products. Soaring energy prices kill jobs and depress living standards, as companies and communities find they must come up with thousands to millions of extra dollars every year, just to keep the lights, heat and air conditioning on and machinery humming.
That means more industries will head overseas, where energy costs and workers’ wages are far lower, while millions of Americans will be relegated to part-time positions, service jobs at far less than they had been getting, or welfare and unemployment benefits for the newly and perhaps permanently jobless.
Meanwhile, the United States will be expected to send billions of dollars to poor countries and emerging economies, as climate change “reparation, mitigation and adaptation” payments, under the new Paris climate treaty. And those now relatively poor nations, including China and India, will be still burning fossil fuels and taking away our jobs, to lift their people out of poverty.
All the sacrifices by Americans, Europeans and families in other now-developed, now-rich countries will be for naught.
This is what the so-called “progressives” want and are marching in the streets to get.
The Climate Alarmists’ Real Goals
Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray saw the second Treaty of Paris coming many years ago. “The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations,” she said. “Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to compliance.”
Last year, UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres stated bluntly:
Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system…. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.
In simpler terms, she intends to replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled, centralized, socialized One World government and economic control.
In November 2010, IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer presented an additional reason for UN climate policies. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,” he said. It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
In addition to everything else that is wrong, destructive and simply perverse about energy and climate policies, these are truly scary developments. And to top it all off, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is now seriously considering the idea of joining state attorneys general in prosecuting companies, organizations and individuals who dare to think independently and refute claims that human-driven global warming is the greatest danger of all to our future well-being.
All of this sounds a lot more like pre-world war two Germany than the United States of America. It is certainly a trend that we should worry about far more than any honestly conceivable threat from any nearly imperceptible human contribution to the climate changes that have always buffeted humanity and our planet.
____________
Joseph D’Aleo is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. He was a college professor and First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel. He has authored books and papers on how natural factors drive seasonal weather and long-term climate trends.
It is implausible that Exxon, or CEI, or any other group or individual, for that matter, KNOWS or KNEW facts about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change that the consensed climate science community does not KNOW now. The consensed climate science community does not KNOW that anthropogenic emissions will cause a climate catastrophe, though they profess to BELIEVE that to be the case.
It is critical, going forward, that the courts clearly distinguish between what is KNOWN and what is merely widely BELIEVED by adherents to the secular religion of climate catastrophe and their enablers. Models based on estimates can hardly be expected to provide revealed truth as output, though the modelers and the adherents to the secular religion of CAGW are certainly free to believe otherwise.
I wonder if swimming pool companies could be sued under such a standard if there are memos about drowning–same for car companies about crashes. What MIGHT happen cannot be a base case in these instances.
It never crossed my mind that I might live to see the day when a President of the United States intentionally damaged the economy.
It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that a bona fide national candidate for that office would campaign on a promise to do intentional harm to the economy and not be seen as a dangerous crackpot and lunatic. It astounds me to realize that the voting public is even dumber than Mencken thought they were.
For clarification: The term “cost of electricity” means the sum of several different costs. In the above listed state of Connecticut, where I live, the cited 20 cents is consists of 2 cents wholesale price, 9 cents delivery charge combined with various “green” charges, and 9 cents for the actual electricity delivered. Thus 20 cents.
Only the 10 cents is the energy and its production cost. And it varies throughout the year. In 2015 for example, it was 13 cents (AMJJ) and 8 cents ASOND).
The distribution cost is independent of the electricity cost and both costs are subject to politics. As we know, utilities are “allowed” to charge and we the users are paying all kinds of hidden costs in the final bill. The bill amount is not a reflection of the cost a free enterprise would charge.
Please tell your “green” friends that wind and solar will start compete when their electricity sells at the above 2 cents rate.
For how much energy renewables contribute see: http://www.masterresource.org/renewable-energy-projections/renewable-energies-the-mirage-of-mass/
Stan
I just re-read my above comment and think that it needs clarification. Mr. D’Aleo’s sentence in the otherwise excellent articles states:
…….. for 2015’s average residential electricity costs ………
This is misleading. It should have said “the cost billed to the residential customers averaged for the state was ……
The cost of “electricity” is actually only a small part of the cost he quoted, as I tried to explain previously.
To illustrate the importance of these varying charges hear this. When the “renewable energies” charges were added to my monthly utility bills two decades ago, I refused to pay for that “green” subsidies item. Soon I was informed that if I do not pay the whole bill I will simply be charged the usual monthly interest. If, on the other hand, I pay the bill sans the “green” charge, I will go to jail. Apparently it is a state law.
So, avoid the term “cost of electricity” if you mean the amount on the monthly bill. It is actually rather difficult to find the true “cost” when you consider that the cost is “regulated” by a regulatory body acting sometime for political reasons.
To repeat what I said previously, the whole-sale price is the best criterion for comparing the cost of electricity. Notice that wind and solar require higher distribution costs for the intermittency, extra wires, ……
Stan
Stan:
I think were thinking about the same concept but lets be sure.
For the purpose of consumer economics decision-making, I suggest that “consumer marginal energy rates” (CMER) are the correct term-of-art. This approach specifically evaluates the cost of energy as it is reflected by changes in consumption as it is billed per actual utility tariff sheets. If Glen Schleede reads this, he will recall the lengthy debate of this concept within DOE the decisions made and DOE neglect thereof.
For more information see: http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/12/f5/marg_eprice_0799.pdf
Anybody whose IQ is higher than their body temperature knows AGW is a scam. What are the so called climate scientists claiming? They claim they can predict the future and control the climate. These are extraordinary claims so I would like to see some examples where they have successfully done this. They can’t provide any.
[…] Wie sie die Indoktrination der Welt hinsichtlich der vermeintlichen Gefahren einer globalen Erwärmung entwickelt haben, beschreiben die Apologeten derselben hier höchstselbst. Wir haben nirgendwo Beweise dafür gefunden, dass deren Behauptungen zutreffend sind. Beispielhaft seien hier diese Links genannt: hier, hier, hier, hier und hier. […]