Climate Morons

It’s always fun to have a Leftist “Man Bites Dog” story.

“Dog Bites Man” – is a Leftist spouting Leftism. Big for Big Media – but not big actual news.

“Man Bites Dog” – is this:

Michael Moore Admits He Had No Idea Where the Juice to Power Electric Cars Came From:

“In a Reuters story promoting Moore’s latest, he admits:

“Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, ‘but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?…

“‘I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,’ Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.”

How’s that Red Pill taste, Mister Flint? Welcome to Reality.

Electric cars require…electricity. And from where does America get its electricity?:

“The United States draws 81 percent of its energy as a whole from fossil fuels, but in 2017, natural gas and coal alone provided 61.8 percent of our electricity.”

But fret not, Mister Flint. Natural gas and nuclear energy are clean as can be. And the coal industry has spent billions of its own dollars to get demonstrably cleaner.

So while your heretofore abject ignorance is amusing – it is accidentally far less hypocritical than you thought.

Fake “green energy,” on the other hand, is about as environmentally hypocritical as one can get – without actually spinning oneself directly into orbit.

Which Mister Flint has now learned – and documented.

Michael Moore-Backed ‘Planet of the Humans’ Takes Apart the Left’s Green Energy Scams

“Green” “energy” – is, in fact, neither. It is all awful for the environment – and at producing energy.

It is fake energy. The decades of Big Media’s pushing it – has been fake news.

Some of us didn’t need pharmaceutical enhancement to figure it out. We knew the “green energy” story – has always been a lie.

Let’s End Welfare Recipient-Fake Energy Wind and Solar

As Always Everywhere, ‘Green Energy’ Is Killing New York’s Economy

And here’s an excellent question…

Why Are Republicans Resurrecting Failed Green Energy Subsidies?

Because – and please pardon our French – green energy…sucks.

It’s all awful for the environment.

Why Renewable Energy Is Bad For The Environment

If Renewables Are So Great for the Environment, Why Do They Keep Destroying It?

The Environmental Disaster of Solar Energy

Why Wind Farms Are Bad for the Environment

Ethanol Damages The Environment, EPA Says

And what little energy it actually produces – is ridiculously, prohibitively expensive.

Green Energy Is 5 Times More Expensive Than Conventional Power

Why Is Renewable Energy So Expensive?

If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?

End the Ethanol Rip-Off

And let us not forget the Magna Carta of moronity…

Green New Deal Would Cost Up to $93 Trillion

And lest we forget….

Green Energy Is Expensive & Won’t Save The Environment – It’s A Wealth Redistribution Scheme

Indeed it is a wealth redistribution scheme. Mostly to government cronies.

Green Scam: 80% of Green Energy Loans Went to Obama Donors

Wow…that’s a lot.

‘Green Cronyism’ Has No Place in Energy Policy

Indeed it should not have a place..

Unfortunately, it has – for a very long, very stupid time.

So…how about this…

It’s Time to End Subsidies for Renewable Energy

Yes, please:

“Renewable energy resources…have received subsidies through the tax code since 1979, most of which have occurred in the last decade.

“Through 2018, these subsidies amounted to more than $100 billion.”

Wow…that’s a lot.

And that’s a lot – fed into a bottomless gaping maw that STILL produces but a tiny fraction of our energy.

In 2019, wind was 7.3%. And solar a whopping 1.8%.

$100 billion down – and still less than 10% of our electricity.

We’ve been throwing bad money after bad – for decades.

Let’s FINALLY stop doing so.

Please.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Air pollution and carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for 50 years
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.

Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. "Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

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