“Al Gore was right about one thing in his rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos: CO2 emissions have continued to climb and show no sign of being affected by ‘climate policy’.” (Jenkins, below)

In less than 800 words, Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist (Feb. 4 – 5, 2023), cut the whole global warming mania down to size. Basically, it’s all over but the shouting. The science is “looking up,” (it never looked down, actually), for reasons that Jenkins only partially examines. And ExxonKnew as a PR stunt is exposed.

Below, I parse Jenkins’s op-ed with subtitles and let his words speak for themselves.

The Al Gore Problem

Al Gore was right about one thing in his rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos: CO2 emissions have continued to climb and show no sign of being affected by “climate policy.”…

“The Houston Chronicle editorialists can cancel me, but they cannot cancel energy density and the perils of dilute, intermittent substitutes for real, stock energies. Reality bats last, and climate alarm and the ‘energy transition’ are doing very poorly outside of getting government favor to keep the mirage going. It is sad that political cronies are the only winners in the futile crusade, and real challenges, opportunity, and need are foregone.”

My longtime hometown paper, The Houston Chronicle, always left-of-center, has gone fully climate alarmist and glowingly reports about the “energy transition”. The paper reports as a PR department with some real energy news (the booming fossil fuel industries) thrown in. Nothing bad about wind and solar except that there is not enough subsidy to make it go faster against the entrenched fossil fuel interests.…

Episode 1 of BBC’s Big Oil vs The World is a polished, emotional, lawyer-like brief for one side of a multi-sided, complex issue. But in the final analysis, the BBC case is long on agenda and feelings and short on facts, balance, and proper context. The documentary is slick propaganda that accuses oil companies of producing slick propaganda.

With its documentary Big Oil vs The World, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has added its voice to the chorus accusing the petroleum industry in general, and ExxonMobil in particular, of misleading the public and slowing the global response to climate change. The three-part documentary (Denial, Doubt, and Delay) was produced in cooperation with PBS, which ran its version on Frontline under the title The Power of Big Oil in April and May of this year.…

“Climate change is no hoax, because the climate always changes. Modest global warming might be beneficial for the globe. But not all climate change is beneficial. Cooling would be disastrous.”

“The American Geophysical Union … displays a diminishing interest in science, that is, in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Instead, it revels in an escalating interest in politics, including much talk about nebulous ideas like ‘environmental justice’ and mobilizing scientists to be ‘change agents.’

Since November 2020, the price of gasoline has steadily increased like a rising tide. A good portion of the pain at the pump that Americans, and people around the world, have felt, and increasingly feel, is due to enormous monetary expansion coupled with disastrous energy policies. The energy-price emergency began long before Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.…