Introduction: A covert alliance forged of mutual interest has declared victory after the recently-concluded Paris climate conclave issued its final accord, garnering almost 200 national signatories. Do they have reason to celebrate — or are their gleeful press statements meant to cover up the real shortfalls of this agreement?
Those behind the climate crusade include opaque, billion-dollar foundations (some funded by shadowy foreign interests) and the deep green NGOs they support (often including past and future members of our governmental agencies); extremely wealthy, opportunistic “environmentalists” hoping to ride the gravy train of the burgeoning trillion-dollar sustainable industry; government regulators, bureaucrats and scientific and quasi-science agencies, completely unaccountable; politicians riding the climate wave; most of the mainstream media; and, sadly, junior and senior members of academia.
How many of the nation-signatories have real commitment to the underlying concept — and how many signed on to guarantee their own seat at the table when the billions of dollars of de-carbonizing reparations are being handed out?
Calling the shots are the unaccountable leadership cadre of the United Nations and its various agencies, and our own Executive Branch (the EPA is its prime enforcement arm), now ruling by decree in the absence of cooperation from the electorate. Their mutual goals: re-distribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer nations, the veritable dismantling of our energy sector, and the overhaul of our capitalistic economic system for the good of all — oblivious to the vast benefits all segments of the global village have received from that very system.
The die is cast…or is it?
After two tumultuous weeks in Paris, the COP-21 Climate Conference under the auspices of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has at last come to an end. Those who have promulgated the urgent need to address “carbon pollution” (the in-term for CO2) to keep the planet from being poached by rising temperatures have declared Victory — others further removed from the environmentalist corps are not so sure.
What really happened? One hundred eighty-plus nations signed on to the...Accord? Agreement? Just don’t call it a treaty, jamais!, as there’s nothing legally binding in it and to call it that would be a death sentence for any hope of initiating the measures desired by the signers, since there would be zero chance of getting two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to approve such a treaty. Or even one-half, I believe.
The signatories agreed that anthropogenic global warming (AGW), formerly known as climate change (CC), is a real and emerging problem — some believe it to be an urgent problem that must be dealt with ASAP. Their common belief is that human activities, specifically including combustion of fossil fuels for energy, which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, is responsible for some, most or all of the predicted rise in temperature.
There are numerous endorsed approaches to impeding the anticipated rising global temperatures, in an attempt, King Canute-like, to intervene with the forces of nature. All of these revolve around cutting down “greenhouse gas” (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels, mainly CO2 (a little-known fact is that the most intense GHG of all is...water vapor!). The stated goal is to keep the global temperature rise to 2 degrees C or less by 2050, although some prefer 1.5 as the criterion. Their concerns include rising seas and weather-related events (both wet, i.e. storms and floods, and dry, i.e. drought) being exacerbated by AGW. Going unchallenged: the dictum that CO2 (and to some extent, methane) emissions are the causative agent and must be suppressed.
The task of convincing many not inculcated in the Green belief system (that the problem is man-made and remediable, caused by excessive CO2 releases, and that inaction will inevitably result in catastrophic meteorological events in the near- or medium-term) has led to a certain degree of hyperbole regarding a wide variety of sensationalist, even apocalyptic predictions, inspired by Al Gore’s 2006 “documentary,” An Inconvenient Truth. Polar icecaps and glaciers melting, islands inundated and disappearing beneath the sea, coastal cities flooded, species eradicated, all of these and much more are scary scenarios unleashed by some die-hard zealots truly fearful of AGW’s impact to garner adherents and petition-signers and marchers to “keep it in the ground,” referring to fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas (methane) mainly. Less passionate, more cynical investors in renewable/sustainable energy modalities seeking to ride the burgeoning green technology gravy train have also adopted these.
Here are some of the real-world facts denied or pushed under the rug by the IPCC: some scientists have determined that atmospheric CO2 levels have been way higher in the not-too-distant past without untoward consequences; some scientists postulate that, rather than CO2 causing rising temps, actually rising temps (via natural climatic cycles) cause CO2 to rise by being released from the world’s oceans. Many scientists believe that the rising temperature is entirely unrelated to CO2, and moreover that the rise will not amount to a planet- or life-threatening increment, and in fact that some warming may well be a good thing, for both humans and the environment. And a recent NASA publication seems to show that not only are the icecaps not melting, but they are actually gaining volume, and further that the likely rise in ocean levels, even with some warming, will amount to approximately 0.27 millimeters (mm) per year — that’s about ten inches over the course of the next century.
But such minor points of contention never entered the minds of the 40,000 or so attendees at the Paris IPCC conference. Anyone considering opening a discussion on a key issue was labeled a “denialist” in the complicit, compliant media and silenced. What about the world’s leading polluter, China? Well, they sort-of promised to begin cutting down their coal emissions in….2030! IF they perceived that other countries were on track to reaching their own goals. Other issues of actual or potential discord were dealt with outside public view, although at one point the Indian delegate, speaking for PM Modi, advised the U.S. spokesperson, Secty.of State John Kerry, that the puny billions of dollars in transition assitance offered to help India shift from coal- (and wood-) burning dirty sources to cleaner wind and solar would not suffice: “trillions in reparations” were now going to be the starting point for the vast redistribution of wealth that might accompany the fight against AGW in the third world.
Wait--”might”? No, that’s actually the raison d’etre of the entire program! President Obama and his entire federal bureaucracy, spearheaded by Gina McCarthy and her EPA, have long planned to use AGW as the key point of entry for their ambitious plan to overhaul our entire energy system and convert it to a green utopia, as well as redistribute a good chunk of our wealth to poorer regions in the name of fighting AGW. Do they actually believe that such efforts will stymie AGW and save the planet from overheating? Who knows? But as soon as Obama pushed through his first term’s legacy project — Obamacare, remember? — he proceeded to proclaim (in 2013) that “global warming is the most important threat we face as a nation,” and the wheels were set in motion to use his executive powers to address this threat by any means necessary.
Knowing full well that his War On Coal via the Clean Power Plan etc., and the tightening of the ozone regs of the NAAQS — both possible in their minds through creative interpretations of amended Clean Air Act — would never make it through Congress, Obama and McCarthy decided to take the bull by the horns and rule by executive decree — IF they could get away with it, through the courts. And why not carpe diem it all the way, and seize power over all the waterways of the United States through the Waters of the US Act: WOTUS, giving the EPA regulatory oversight over just about any body of water down to a lawn sprinkler? Twenty-eight states are suing the EPA to thwart implementation of the CPP and WOTUS (the latter has been estopped via temporary injunction: the judge believes that the plaintiff would suffer irremediable harm and have a high likelihood of winning).
Why are the cleanest and safest modalities for reducing GHGs — natural gas, mostly from the “shale gas revolution, fracking”, and nuclear energy — not featured prominently in the IPCC’s manifesto? What do the left-wing fringe behind much of this hysteria hate and fear about nuclear power? And they fail to acknowledge that the USA is well on the way to actually attaining Obama’s GHG/CO2 reductions, thanks to the skyrocketing supplies of and use of natural gas, which has a fraction of the atmospheric effects of coal and oil.
Why do the gloom-and-doom AGW scenarists threaten and even sue scientists who dispute their assertions, accusing them en masse of being shills for Big Oil? Is it because they do not actually have the courage of the convictions? Indeed, when Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the Chair of the House Energy Committee, tried to request, then demand, scientific notes from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s head, Kathryn Sullivan to explain how the agency’s opinions about an alleged 18-year hiatus in warming had somehow been revised to eliminate that interval, he was stonewalled by NOAA. Indeed, the infamous Michael Mann, he of the “hockey-stick” phony graphic explanation of CC, wrote an op-ed that appeared in the NY Times, whining about the chutzpah of the committee’s head, saying in essence, “How dare he presume to question the science behind AGW? The nerve!” To try to extract evidence in support of the green hysteria, even by authorities vested with oversight over our federal purse strings, is equivalent to denialism, as Mann accused Smith.
Seriously, what are we left with after the thousands of climate missionaries have departed Paris for home? A bunch of good intentions backed up by nothing much. Worse than nothing actually, since if their intentions are as they indicated in their INDCs (intended nationally-determined contributions), CO2 emissions will be guaranteed to rise by 40-something percent over the next 15 years! Those members not signing up with the “High Ambition Coalition” to really suppress dirty carbon include Turkey, India, Russia, Indonesia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Brazil and Argentina are suspect too.
The worst though has to be China, which has sort-of promised to begin cutting down on its smog-choking emissions by 2030 — IF we do it first. Funny, the Chinese government will have more say over our American economy and energy sector than the U.S. Congress and the American taxpayer! Such is the way of “progressive incrementalism.” That’s how the U.N., in consort with progressive leftists over the years, has always transformed its ideology into "science" in order to promote its vision of World Government in the best interests of The People. Not the American people, that’s for sure.
Pope Francis got into the act, condemning “consumptive capitalism” as he endorsed the IPCC’s vision of saving the earth. Too bad the Catholic Church doesn’t reach out more to help the world’s impoverished masses, while the continuing improvement in any objective measure of third world health and living standards owes every bit of such progress to fossil-fuel based consumptive capitalism. Sadly, the underlying motivation of many of the climate marchers is the dismantling of capitalism to distribute the vast wealth they perceive in industrial achievements, fossil fuels and others, to attain income equality for the poor. But first, a stopover in their own pockets is in the cards. “Progressives” are always eager to surrender freedoms, as long as it’s “for your own good,” as they define it. Sure, let’s fight AGW — by ceding absolute power to the executive branch, because they’ll do it right, and we all will have to make sacrifices (again, like Obamacare in many ways).
They want to create "equality" via two methods: by depriving richer populations of wealth, and by telling the poor how to improve their lot — but only to levels consistent with the progressive ideal of climate-friendly sustainability.
If the Greeniacs succeed in reversing progress and de-constructing our energy economy, there is no question that, like Germany (where both coal and nuclear sources are basically being mothballed), energy-electric prices will soar. Bad enough here, but in the poorer regions such a change will lead, inevitably, to mass starvation, recurrences of diseases we thought now in check, real suffering. Do the climate crusaders care? Did this same bunch care when the DDT ban led to a million needless deaths from malaria each year? No, they did not. Next question. Carbon-based energy remains essential to maintain energy in the third world, not to mention providing it for the first time to the 1.3 billion who still do not have it.
I would urge one and all to try to prevent this insidious, insane plan to roll back American prosperity in the service of a vague endpoint, by an elected, unaccountable passel of bureaucrats and petty tyrants, and entirely without our consent.
In the name of "the climate," unaccountable regulators will rule our world, if we let them
Related articles
- Global Fossil-Fuel Emissions Could Decline In 2015, Thanks To Natural Gas
- 11,000 Scientists + Micky Mouse Sign Climate Paper Without Fact Checking Cites- Carbon Tax Error- And Uncited Fate Of Humanity
- America's Great Leap Forward: Watermelon Environmentalism
- President Elect Trump- Why Climate Change Is No Longer A Political Issue Outside The US
- Yes, We Can Rise To The IPCC Target To Keep Global Warming Within 1.5°C (2.7°F)
Comments