Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A snowy winter in New York City brings with it a kind of magic. The air goes crisp, then bitter, and fragile snowflakes sift down in the early dark, silvering the trees and blanketing the sledding hills in the parks. After the first big snow, children and adults alike rush out to make snowmen, creations that delight passersby for the next two frigid months, until the snow finally thaws. When I took my older son, then a toddler, out for his first-ever sledding session, he squealed with awe at the crystalline world before him, shouting, “It looks like Frozen!”
Today he’s 5, and I doubt he remembers what sledding feels like. It’s been more than 650 days since Central Park, where snow is measured daily, got more than an inch of snowfall at one time; last winter, the park got just 2.3 inches in total, less than one-tenth the normal amount. In early December, Brooklyn saw a few anemic flurries, and my son told me excitedly that his friends had tried to build a snowman during recess. But there was nowhere near enough material to work with. They settled for “a pile of snowflakes.”
This sense of winter melting away before our eyes is not unique to New York: While blazing-hot summers and stormy autumns come with their own dangers, scientists say winter is actually the fastest-warming season. Snowfall is decreasing across the Northeast, the flakes slowly replaced by raindrops. The Great Lakes have experienced a 22 percent drop in maximum ice cover since 1973, and are frozen for a shorter percentage of the year. In December 2022, Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, posted its warmest winter temperature ever at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 36 degrees above the frigid average for that time of year.
New York may have enjoyed a few years of mild winters, but other parts of the world stretching from Europe and Russia to China have been experiencing extreme and in some cases record breaking cold, so I suggest the assertion that winter has disappeared is probably a little premature.
In 2012 the VOX reporter who wrote the article above published a novel “America Pacifica“, about political intrigue in the colony of the last survivors of an extreme ice age, a new snowball Earth.
The reporter doesn’t seem to have published any novels about the grim survivors of our coming age of warmer beach weather. Perhaps warm weather isn’t scary enough for a dramatic novel.
Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.
Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.
Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.
Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a 200% Renewable Energy Target to soak up carbon penance money out of the mainland. Of course, wind power is still essential (how could he say anything else?) but some of these wind farms — a small number — will do more damage to the environment than they will prevent. The wind farm developers are “not doing it in the service of the planet” you know.
This all very well, but ten years too late. When skeptics were predicting exactly this outcome — that Green policies would wreck the environment, where were the Greens? They weren’t saying “let’s listen to the climate deniers” — or climate deniers are people too you know. All their talk of building communities was the Gucci fashion show of hipster vegans who would just as soon demonize half the population as have a coffee with them.
Who needs maths?
As usual, the Greens biggest failure — and they condemn birds and whales with it every day — is that they can not do maths. They want to micromanage a bit of a wind farm here and a bit there — without doing the sums. To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day. Where will they go? Where exactly will those gigawatts fit among the gum trees, and the ten thousand kilometers of high voltage lines too? That’s eighty million kilometers of transmission lines around the globe. How many trees, bats, birds and koala’s will they kill?
Bob Brown protests at the Adani coal mine at Parliament House. By Andrew Meares, Flickr
Veteran conservationist Bob Brown has turned on sections of the wind industry, accusing some developers of “profiteering” from climate change and not caring about the planet, while warning the wind rush risks accelerating extinctions.
He was concerned the Tasmanian government’s pursuit of a 200 per cent renewable energy target – to allow surplus power to be exported to the mainland – was driven by “profiteering” under the guise of climate action.
The Bob Brown Foundation continues to fight the 100-turbine wind farm proposed for Robbins Island by ACEN Australia.
“The real driving reason for that (200 per cent renewables target) is profiteering by people like ACEN, moving into a lucrative new market which is being forced by the exigencies of climate change,” Dr Brown said.
Bob Brown is also opposed to the windfarm being built to the west of Cairns in the Daintree National Park, a project he calls “appalling”. In that he is correct.
From the press release — the Greens have a vision that we can save the world just by turning off a few appliances at home:
“This is part of humanity’s deliberated destruction of the natural world which sustains all life,” Bob Brown said today.
“Instead of turning off wasted electricity, we will wreck another surviving stronghold of natural wildlife diversity in Australia. It is now up to the Albanese government and national environment minister Tanya Plibersek to protect the cornucopia of nature which Robbins Island holds. They should at least back the Tasmanian EPA position.”
So we keep the 1.5C global safety limit under control just with a few more windfarms and turning off the standby light on the stereo?
People need to realize the Left is using the alleged “existential” threat of global warming to wage war against liberty, against the Western world’s (not China’s) economy, and against joy.
Everything the Left touches, it destroys – including joy
People need to realize the Left is using the alleged “existential” threat of global warming to wage war against liberty, against the Western world’s (not China’s) economy, and against joy.
The automobile, that magnificent enhancement to human freedom and joy, is a target of the Left. The idea that individuals should be able to go where they want when they want in their own car is anathema to the Left – it provides way too much individual liberty. Ideally, almost no one should own a car. We should all aspire to live in a high-rise apartment building in a major metropolis and use public transportation, ride bicycles or walk. If for some reason we have to travel a longer distance, let us say to conservative relatives who selfishly own their own homes in the suburbs, we can use public transportation; and if none is available, we can use Uber or Lyft.
Even the family, one of life’s greatest sources of joy and meaning, is a target of the climate change activists. They believe that there are way too many people in the world. Kids are carbon-emitting machines. So, an increasing number of women, including married women, are choosing not to have children. They don’t see how they can justify bringing children into a world in which they will be roasted to death. And frequently their progressive parents (the would-be grandparents) agree with them. As I wrote in a previous column, based on the many comments of New York Times readers on an opinion piece written by a woman who has decided not to have children because of global warming, many readers wrote that despite the fact that they long for grandchildren, they support their child’s decision to go childless.
Now we have another joy of life that progressives are targeting in the name of combating global warming: Christmas gifts. Many progressives have long opposed giving Christmas gifts in the name of combating “consumerism” (to be fair, some religious conservatives share that ascetic view). But climate change will soon constitute the greater moral reason.
In the Daily Mail this week, a woman wrote an article making this case.
“Last year,” she wrote, “surrounded by wrapping paper and abandoned gifts, I suggested to my husband Chris that next time we shouldn’t buy anything — for each other or the children.
“Not buying anything for my husband is trivial because he can buy for himself. But not buying presents for our two girls, aged six and three, is a trickier proposition…
“We’re increasingly aware of the global impact of our purchases. Everything we buy the kids will go into landfill…
“With the planet on fire and plastics everywhere it seems like we are at a moment of reckoning and have been for some time…
“I’ve forced this rule on the family, telling my mother, in-laws and the brothers and sisters not to buy the girls anything.
“My sister was appalled and very cross that she will be thought of as the mean old aunt. Just because I want to strip the joy out of Christmas, why should she have to?”
This woman’s article encapsulates much of the darkness the Left represents and creates.
First is the war on joy. Part of the joy of Christmas, especially for children, is receiving gifts. To deny this is to deny reality. This can be verified by asking any adult to describe the joy they experienced as a child looking under the Christmas tree for their gifts.
Second, it is a war on altruism. Gift-giving may be animated by a number of factors, but one fact is undeniable: Giving people gifts is an altruistic act. If people stop doing so – whether to combat “consumerism” or to combat global warming – they are ending one of the most widespread expressions of altruism in our society.
Third, children are the primary targets of this nonsense. Progressives seem to have a particular animus for children. They wage war on children’s innocence with early “sex education,” with LGBTQ activism in elementary school, and by promoting drag queen “story hours” beginning at age 5; by their closing schools for nearly two years for no valid reason; by depriving children of God, religion and patriotism; by their irrationally frightening children about their future (they will essentially be burned alive); and now by depriving children of Christmas gifts and, presumably, birthday gifts (they, too, add to landfills).
Fourth, the woman who wrote this article has no qualms about imposing her beliefs on everyone else. It is not enough for her to tell her husband not to give her 6- and 3-year-old daughters Christmas gifts. She has ordered the girls’ grandparents, aunts and uncles not to do so: “I’ve forced this rule on the family.”
Fifth, progressive reasoning is not only morally defective, but also factually defective. If no one in the United Kingdom gave a single Christmas gift, nothing would be accomplished with regard to global warming. But a whole society would be deprived of a major joy of life, and the country’s economy would take a major hit.
Just remember this rule of life: Everything the Left touches, it destroys.
That includes joy.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His commentary on Deuteronomy, the third volume of “The Rational Bible,” his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, was published in October 2022. He is the co-founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com. COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS
The Oregon Court of Appeals struck down the state’s ambitious Climate Protection Program. This decision, hailed by utilities and industry groups, is a stark reminder of the overreach often seen in state-level environmental regulations.
The Oregon Court of Appeals struck down the state’s ambitious Climate Protection Program. This decision, hailed by utilities and industry groups, is a stark reminder of the overreach often seen in state-level environmental regulations. The court found that the Environmental Quality Commission, the policy and rule-making board for Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality, failed to meet heightened disclosure requirements, a fundamental aspect of lawful and transparent governance.
The Climate Protection Program, approved in December 2021, mandated significant cuts in emissions from various sectors, including natural gas utilities and large industrial plants. However, the program’s ambitious goals overlooked the practical implications and feasibility of such drastic measures. The court’s decision to invalidate the program underscores the necessity of realistic environmental policies, and following the law rather than blatantly ramming through illegal, idealistic, and unattainable targets.
Oregon’s three gas utilities, an oil-industry group, and several local trade organizations challenged the program’s rules last year. Their victory in court is not just a win for these industries but also a win for common sense. It highlights the importance of balanced, legal, and fair rule-making processes that consider the economic and practical aspects of environmental regulations.
The court’s decision focused on a clear disclosure requirements of the statute – the failure of the Environmental Quality Commission to meet disclosure requirements. This focus on procedural integrity is crucial. It ensures that any significant regulatory changes, especially those impacting major industries and the economy, are made transparently and with due diligence. The court rightly prioritized the rule of law over the substance of the program itself, much to the chagrin of the end justifies the means activists.
The state acknowledged that the notice it submitted did not include an explicit statement about additional federal requirements. The state said it “substantially complied” with state rules by posting the notice of proposed rulemaking on its website, sending it to over 20,000 recipients and conducting 18 months of public outreach.
They argued industries had ample time to understand that the program would impose additional requirements, why the rules were needed and what alternatives it had considered.
But the court ruled that is not enough.
“Substantial compliance … is not sufficient. The statute requires actual compliance,” the court wrote.
Very understated of the court: “The statute requires actual compliance.”
The court rightly noted that “substantial compliance” is not sufficient. Actual compliance with statutory requirements is non-negotiable, especially when it comes to regulations that have far-reaching implications for industries and consumers alike.
The challengers of the program praised the court’s decision, viewing it as a constructive step towards addressing climate change in a more balanced and effective manner. On the other hand, environmental advocates expressed disappointment, seeing the decision as a setback.
The Oregon Court of Appeals’ decision to strike down the Climate Protection Program highlights the importance of procedural integrity and balanced rule-making that considers the economic realities and practical limitations of ambitious environmental goals, and following the law. This ruling should serve as a precedent for other states, encouraging them slow down the insane ideological rush to ignore laws, procedural, rules, and regulations.
The court’s decision underscores the importance of legal and procedural rigor in the formulation of such policies and serves as a cautionary tale against overzealous regulatory ambitions that fail to account for practical realities.
“RCP8.5 does not provide a physically consistent worst case [Business-as-Usual] BAU trajectory that warrants continued emphasis in scientific research. Accordingly, it does not provide a useful benchmark for policy studies.”
– Ritchie and Dowlatabadi (2017)
Responding to the Open Consultation of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions
“RCP8.5 does not provide a physically consistent worst case [Business-as-Usual] BAU trajectory that warrants continued emphasis in scientific research. Accordingly, it does not provide a useful benchmark for policy studies.”
“The SCSE aims to increase federally regulated financial institutions’ (FRFIs) understanding of their potential exposures to climate-related risks. It also aims to build their capacity to conduct climate scenario analysis and risk assessments. As a fully standardized exercise, the SCSE will also give OSFI a comparable quantitative assessment of climate-related risks across FRFIs.”
This report provides a response to that consultation prepared by Friends of Science Society.
There is ever more pressure on banks, financial institutions and corporations to report on climate risks related to their investments and operations, particularly as market pressures grow such as potential litigation for failing to properly report climate risk, ever more climate regulation – particularly on the fossil fuel sector, rising carbon prices and the advent of Carbon Border Adjustment levies in some jurisdictions.
Thus, the OSFI has developed this Standardized Climate Scenario Exercise (SCSE) to attempt to help financial institutions under its supervision to understand their climate risks and to provide a standardized tool.
“The SCSE aims to measure climate risks that are arguably not reflected using traditional risk quantification techniques, e.g., models that use historical experience to measure risks. The SCSE will consider characteristics associated with individual exposures that are not typically used in risk quantification today but may provide strong risk discrimination under future climate scenarios. The SCSE will not consider broad impacts of macroeconomic stresses since FRFIs’ stress testing and capital requirements already consider the impact of a stressed macroeconomic environment.” [Bold emphasis added]
The OSFI employs a series of computer simulated scenarios known as the “Representative Concentration Pathways” as baseline scenarios claiming that the RCPs ‘describe future emissions patterns’ and that ‘each scenario makes a different assumption about global average temperatures.’
This is how the RCP scenarios look in relation to one another.
Figure 1
The stated objective of NetZero targets is to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (over pre-industrial temperatures) as per the Paris Agreement. Few people realize that the 1.5°C target is a political, not a scientific goal.[1]
According to the creators of the RCP scenarios, these scenarios are not meant to be used as policy prescriptive instruments, but this is what the OSFI is doing, as is the Bank of Canada, and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),[2] which means that international finance is being skewed by improper use of the RCP scenarios. Here the authors of van Vuuren et al (2011) caution against the misuse of the RCP scenarios:
Climate policy analyst and long-time insurance industry advisor on disaster risk,[3] Roger Pielke, Jr. and his research colleague, Justin Ritchie have detailed how the misuse of these scenarios is distorting our understanding of climate science and the view of our climate future.[4] Pielke, Jr. directly addresses the scenarios of the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS)[5] in this presentation;[6] he describes them as ‘wildly implausible and of questionable practical utility.’
“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 C” (the Paris Agreement’s proposed limit on 21st-century temperature increases), said conference president Ahmed al Jaber, “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman dared countries to try to choke off the oil supply: “Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
After two weeks of negotiation, the United Nations climate conference in Dubai agreed last week to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Left unanswered is whether governments are supposed to do that by reducing supply, reducing demand or both. A lot rides on the answer, but neither would affect the climate much.
In the demand-side scenario, technology saves the day with cost-competitive renewables. This is the vision of the International Energy Agency, according to which the more rapid the transition from fossil fuels, the more precipitous the decline in fossil-fuel prices. In its “Net Zero Emissions” scenario, oil demand drops faster than supply this decade, pushing oil prices below $30 a barrel soon after 2030, which corresponds to $1-a-gallon gasoline.
Yet even with fossil-fuel prices near historic highs, effective renewable substitutes are nowhere near cost-competitive. They’d have to get cheaper still to compete with $30-a-barrel oil. And in developed countries, especially the U.S., it’s impossible to get permits quickly enough for the staggering amount of renewable capacity that would be needed.
In the supply-side approach, governments would slash oil production or impose rationing, hoping to make fossil fuels so expensive that renewables are the only option. This is the dark vision of “Stop Oil” and Greta Thunberg. But as long as renewable substitutes aren’t immediately available and oil and gas remain necessary, a small reduction in supply causes prices to soar. That means windfall profits for energy companies, scarcity for everyone else, and electoral danger for the governments responsible. Ms. Thunberg claims that climate change is a “death sentence” for the poor, but the poor are far more vulnerable to disruptions in energy supply. In the 1970s, an oil boycott aimed at the U.S. caused famines in Africa.
While the stop-oil view was popular at Dubai, there were enough adults in the room to keep the conference from committing to it. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 C” (the Paris Agreement’s proposed limit on 21st-century temperature increases), said conference president Ahmed al Jaber, “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman dared countries to try to choke off the oil supply: “Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Poor countries are clear-eyed about the danger of energy poverty. “We are not going to compromise with the availability of power for growth,” said India’s minister for power, R.K. Singh. China has more coal plants under construction than are in operation in the U.S. Few rich countries have announced plans to stop drilling for oil or gas, and none of those are major producers. Even President Biden ran away from increasing the gasoline tax as soon as prices went above $3 a gallon in the summer of 2021.
The administration’s answer to this conundrum is to defer political consequences via the regulatory state. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to require that all coal and natural-gas plants shut down or adopt unproven zero-carbon technologies by 2038. Another EPA proposal would require 62% of all cars sold in America to be fully electric by 2032.
Assuming they survive court challenges and future administrations, they would impose soaring prices and reduced mobility on Americans. They would have almost no impact on global temperatures unless other countries, including China and India, also commit to energy poverty. The question is how much damage these policies will do before they’re abandoned.
Mr. Loyola teaches environmental law at Florida International University and is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
It seems like yet another climate doomsday prediction has failed to materialize.
In August of 2005, the ever-alarmed Guardian posted this scare story:
Warming hits ‘tipping point’
Siberia feels the heat It’s a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas and, for the first time since the ice age, it is melting. … “If we don’t take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide,” he said. “There’s still time to take action, but not much.
The article continues with:
Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres – the size of France and Germany combined – has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
…
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying “tipping points” – delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth’s temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.
…
The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University and is reported in New Scientist today.
The researchers found that what was until recently a barren expanse of frozen peat is turning into a broken landscape of mud and lakes, some more than a kilometre across.
Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.
Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.
“When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it’s unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply,” said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Three things in the article are important to note:
As indicated by this PowerPoint presentation, the researcher Kirpotin visited in the summer, not the winter We have no weather records back to 11,000 years ago, we don’t know if such an event occurred in the summers of past millennia. But, it is reasonable to assume that given the propensity for that region to have large temperature swings, some melting in the summer is regular event every few years or decades. From Wikipedia, bold mine:
Verkhoyansk, a town further north and further inland, recorded a temperature of −69.8 °C (−93.6 °F) for three consecutive nights: 5, 6 and 7 February 1933. Each town is alternately considered the Northern Hemisphere’s Pole of Cold – the coldest inhabited point in the Northern hemisphere. Each town also frequently reaches 30 °C (86 °F) in the summer, giving them, and much of the rest of Russian Siberia, the world’s greatest temperature variation between summer’s highs and winter’s lows, often well over 94–100+ °C (169–180+ °F) between the seasons.
They say “…the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.” This indicates they don’t actually know, but are speculating. Speculation is not science, it is opinion. Further, three or four years is not long enough to establish any sort or climate pattern, which is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as being 30 years:
Climate is the average weather conditions for a particular location over a long period of time, ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. WMO uses a 30-year period to determine the average climate.
If we believe The Guardian story and those climate scientists in 2005, the whole area in Siberia must be a warm soupy mess by now, right?
Wrong.
That extended warming and melting just isn’t happening. While the researchers sounded alarm over a warm summer in Siberia in 2005, this past year has been completely the opposite. For example, this Washington Post Story from Jan 10, 2023: Siberia sees coldest air in two decades as temperature dips to minus-80
It must be tough to keep that permafrost at a melting tipping point with winter temperatures like that. Here is the view of the region today, note the widespread below zero temperatures:
You can be certain that any permafrost that “melted” during the summer is now refrozen and the tipping point aka “methane monster” is still in slumber.
Permafrost peatlands approach a climate tipping point Permafrost peatlands in Europe and Western Siberia are much closer to a climatic tipping point than previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Leeds. Scientists estimate that, even with the strongest efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and therefore limit climate change, by 2040 the climates of Northern Europe will no longer be cold and dry enough to sustain peat permafrost.
If I’m still alive in 2040, I’ll write about it then. But my guess (or speculation if you like) based on the history so far is that the permafrost will still be there in Siberia, no catastrophic tipping point will have occurred, and the doomsday goalposts will have been pushed to 2060 and beyond.
There was much scaremongering from the alarmist community when Antarctic sea ice extent fell earlier in the year. As the Antarctic summer begins, the melt has slowed down, to the extent that extent is not even the lowest since 1979, and it is higher than in 2017
There was much scaremongering from the alarmist community when Antarctic sea ice extent fell earlier in the year. As the Antarctic summer begins, the melt has slowed down, to the extent that extent is not even the lowest since 1979, and it is higher than in 2017:
But much more important is the fact that sea ice volume remains higher than the early 1980s, thanks to the fact that it is much thicker than normal around the peninsula:
Energy is not for conserving; it is for unleashing to serve us, to make our lives better, to allow us to realize our dreams and to reach for the stars, those bright lights that pierce the darkness of the night.
“Energy is not for conserving; it is for unleashing to serve us, to make our lives better, to allow us to realize our dreams and to reach for the stars, those bright lights that pierce the darkness of the night.”
Since early men ignited the first fires in caves, the unleashing of energy for light, heat, cooking, and every human need has been the essence and symbol of what it is to be human. The Greeks saw Prometheus vanquishing the darkness with the gift of fire to men. The Romans kept an eternal flame burning in the Temple of Vesta. Our deepest thoughts and insights are described as sparks of fire in our minds. A symbol of death is a fading flame; Poet Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Thus a symbol of the deepest social darkness is seen in the recent extinguishing of the lights of cities across Australia and in other industrialized countries, not as a result of power failures or natural disasters, not as a conscious act of homage for the passing of some worthy soul, but to urge us all to limit energy consumption for fear of global warming.
This is not the symbol of the death but, rather, of the suicide of a civilization.
Certainly most of the individuals turning off their lights saw their acts in a narrower perspective. They have been told by every media outlet that the warming of the earth’s atmosphere due to human activities will certainly cause a global catastrophe unless we act now to radically curtail our energy use. The case for disaster is still weak; but this matter, which deserves dispassionate and serious consideration, is being hyped like the problematic products aimed at an attention deficit disordered audience by the entertainment industry and by pandering politicians.
In our individual lives it is quite rational to want the most for the least. We want the highest quality food, automobiles, and houses for the lowest price. And we want to pay as little as possible to run our cars, heat our homes, and power our consumer electronics. This means we want to waste as little as possible because waste is money that could be spent on other needs. So turning off the lights in an unused room is an act of self-interest.
The goal of our actions should always be our own welfare. And in a fundamental sense, this means using the material and energy in the world around us for our own well-being. The means for doing so is the exercise of our rational minds, to discover how to light a fire, to create a dynamo to generate electricity by burning fossil fuels or to tap the inexhaustible energy of the atom. The standard by which to choose which means is best is economics. In a free market, if producers can generate a kilowatt of power for pennies by burning oil compared to dollars per kilowatt through windmills and solar panels, it makes no sense to use the latter.
Some will argue that the full costs of each means must take account of unintended adverse consequences such as pollution that measurably harms our lives, health, and property. But there are means for dealing with such externalities—usually involving a strict application of property rights—that will not harm us far more than the alleged ills they aim to alleviate by dampening creative human activities and innovations.
When the costs of generating energy via oil rise too high as supplies dwindle—still many decades if not centuries away—our creative minds in a free market will develop less costly ways to harness wind, wave, and sunlight.
Through short-sightedness, sloppy thinking, emotional indulgence, and even a deep malice, many environmentalists today—especially in their approach to global warming—are perpetuating an ethos of darkness. Consider the harm of their symbolic acts, to say nothing of the policies many of them advocate.
Most individuals acquire their values through the culture, often through implicit messages that they do not subject to rational analysis. The implicit message for many of turning off the lights of a city is that we should feel guilty for the act of being human, that is, for altering and employing the environment for our own use.
In her novel Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand describes the consequences of such an assumption in the view from a plane flying over a collapsing country:
New York City … rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness… The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly … as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize … that the lights of New York had gone out.
We must keep focused clearly on the fundamental issues in every discussion about the environment: the right of individuals to pursue their own well-being as they see fit; the requirement that man the creator utilize the material and energy in the environment to meet his needs; the rational exercise of our minds as the way to discover the best means to do so; and the exercise of that capacity as a source of pride and self-esteem
The spectacle of a city skyline at night is the beauty of millions of individuals at their most human.
Energy is not for conserving; it is for unleashing to serve us, to make our lives better, to allow us to realize our dreams and to reach for the stars, those bright lights that pierce the darkness of the night.
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Edward Hudgins is founder and head of the Human Achievement Alliance. His previous associations have been with the Heartland Institute (research director); the Atlas Society (director of advocacy, senior scholar); and the Cato Institute (director of regulatory studies).
There is a certain kind of celebrity who is so worthy they can’t contain it. For Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mary Portas and Kevin McCloud that meant making a thought-provoking new documentary on climate change. Sorry, the climate crisis. We knew it was going to be thought-provoking right from the start because Kevin made some funny faces.
A review of ‘The Great Climate Fight’ which was broadcast on Channel 4. By NZW’s Head of Policy, Harry Wilkinson.
There is a certain kind of celebrity who is so worthy they can’t contain it. For Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mary Portas and Kevin McCloud that meant making a thought-provoking new documentary on climate change. Sorry, the climate crisis. We knew it was going to be thought-provoking right from the start because Kevin made some funny faces.
The premise of the show was very simple. Climate change is cheap and easy to solve but that’s not happening because the Government. We were presented with some graphs appearing to show that cost of wind powered electricity was now significantly cheaper than gas-fired electricity – which is a comforting myth to believe in, if you ignore the cost of intermittency and the huge carbon taxes slapped on gas power stations. Even headline strike prices of offshore wind are now surging – a recent development that the documentary makers conveniently left out.
Nevertheless, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an earnestness that makes him stand out as the most sincere and genuine of the three presenters. It is touching at times, but hopelessly naïve. The documentary comes across as a sixth form Geography project which thinks it has a big idea – but the teacher hasn’t told them they have heard it all before.
So many of its main lines are the same ones used repeatedly by the Government and the green policy establishment for years. These revolve around the idea that there are all these green economic opportunities around Net Zero and we’ll all be better off (if we just ignore the costs and challenges). As it happens, this has been the political consensus for well over a decade and just look where it has got us.
We see the recycled Carbon Brief line about David Cameron’s famous ‘cutting of the green crap’ supposedly costing us £3.1 billion last winter in additional gas import costs. But this ignores the cost of the additional subsidies and insulation measures that would have been incurred, and the impact of more unreliable wind generation on the National Grid.
Green lobby talking points come up so frequently that it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Big Green was somehow involved in the production of the programme. In this alternative universe we hear about the “generous treatment of the oil and gas sector” – a sector, let’s remember, which is about the most highly taxed in the country and was even before the introduction of the so-called ‘windfall tax’.
The Climate Change Committee’s 6th Carbon Budget is presented as a holy document and the presenters resort to smuggling a copy of it into Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire family home with the help of an internet prankster. A desperate denouement for what is a 2-hour long climate version of Harry and Paul’s famous “the bankers, the bonuses” sketch, albeit far less entertaining for all the extra minutes.
Craig Mackinlay is the only alternative voice we hear on the programme, but he is given just a matter of seconds after which his arguments are immediately disparaged. The Channel 4 whose remit was to promote debate and alternative perspectives is sadly a thing of the past. A programme which genuinely showed both sides of the climate policy debate would have been fascinating, but this was never going to be that.
This was a programme whose timing could hardly have been worse. Its totemic idea that ‘wind is cheap’ was crumbling just as it aired; thanks in part to the excellent work of my colleagues at Net Zero Watch in exposing the high costs of wind energy, and the embarrassing announcement from the Government of much higher new subsidies for wind power. Irrelevant and outdated from the moment it was broadcast, it stands as a record of green hubris.
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