“We must also begin planning our economic recovery in a way that protects us from the impact of climate change and … accelerates a just transition off fossil fuels….”

“The ideas here draw on proposals from a range of Democratic primary campaigns, in particular those of Corey Booker, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jay Inslee, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, and Elizabeth Warren.”

Reproduced below is an “Open Letter and Call to Action to Members of Congress” by a ad hoc group advertising itself as “climate and social policy experts in academia and civil society.” Signatories include

• Deep ecologist and New Yorker writer Bill McKibben;
• Climate campaigner, author, and ‘intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal‘ Naomi Klein; and
• Obama-era EPA Administrator, Harvard Professor and NRDC head Gina McCarthy; and

While fringe, the 5,000-word manifesto is noteworthy as an example of the latest Green New Deal thinking.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy, environmental, and education policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every two± weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more important articles in this issue are:
Study: Green New Deal would cost $75K per household in first year
Sorry Virtue Signalers, a Carbon Tax Would Have No Impact on Climate
14± million trees felled in Scotland for wind development, 2000–2019
Why Some Families Living Near Wind Facilities Contemplate Vacating Their Homes
The Misguided Green Virtue-Signaling of Solar Panel Mandates
Surprising Disadvantages of Using Solar Energy
Don’t like CO2?…

“It’s never been remotely plausible that [Exxon] did not understand the science.” – Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), Scientific American, 2015.

“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest…. [Critics] pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.” – Allan Jeffers (ExxonMobil) Scientific American, 2015.

The conclusion that the physical science of climate change was “settled” or “proven” in favor of crisis is a major history-of-thought fallacy. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University (quoted above), must make peace with the quotations below from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as many others, to show that ‘settled science’ on the human influence on climate unambiguously pointed toward alarm.…

“To refine our estimates of climate sensitivity will require breakthroughs in climate physics and more high-quality measurements…. Both outcomes likely lie a couple decades hence….”

“Are Climate Model Projections too Hot?” Niskanen Center (downloaded January 19, 2020)

Climate activists, whether scientists or members of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), eschew direct debate. “The science is settled!” … “We must take action now!” … All to keep fossil fuels in the ground and let the consumers worry about energy affordability, reliability, and convenience.

But the holy grail of climate sensitivity to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, the enhanced greenhouse effect, remains in stubborn dispute today as in the 1980s. The range of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is wide and not expected to come down soon.

The bottom end, as projected by models and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is in net positive territory, according to leading climate economists.…