Radical Green New Deal predictions

 

Jack Hellner at American Thinker debunks some “global warming” myths: 

Here are some of the destructive policies of the radical greenies that are based on predictions, not scientific data:

The destruction of energy-producing companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  (They clearly don't care about the harm to the poor and middle class by high inflation.)

The promotion of the highly flammable pollutant lithium while seeking to control CO2, a non-pollutant clear gas that makes plants grow and allows the world to be fed.

Spending trillions on carbon capture.

Selling worthless carbon credits so people like John Kerry can pretend they care as they fly in their private jets.

Outlawing gas stoves, furnaces, lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, and gas grills.

The destruction of fishing and killing of whales by wind farms.

Read the rest here.

RELATED:  Edward Ring at American Greatness just published “The Corruption of Climate Science”;  click here.

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Reasons to oppose Electric Vehicles

 

John Hinderaker at PowerLine shares some common sense objections to California's mad dash to electric vehicles (and yes, it's coming to Ohio also):

Are people finally starting to catch on to the fact that electric vehicles are a terrible idea? I hope so. Bjorn Lomborg makes the case in accessible form in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, EVs don’t even save much on CO2 emissions:

Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

What does that up to, in terms of climate?

If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

On that basis alone, the left’s mania to make us all drive electric vehicles is insane. But from there on, the story is all negative:

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

. . .

Left-wing governments are on a collision course with normal Americans. Governments want to force Americans to rely on wind and solar energy, but those sources can’t keep the lights on and are ruinously expensive. Similarly, governments want to force us all into electric vehicles, which are not as functional as gas-powered vehicles, despite being more expensive. And they are a net detriment to the environment. Lomborg is optimistic, perhaps more so than I am:

Read the rest here.

And Mr. Hinderaker didn’t even get to the problems with existing minerals required to produce the batteries, or the disposal of spent batteries, or the horrific damage done by strip mining to extract, say, the lithium (see aerial image at the top).

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Last chance to save Earth

 

The editorial board at Issues and Insights published this earlier today:

John Kerry said earlier this month that we’ve reached “the last best opportunity we have to get real and serious” about global warming. What’s the difference between him and a loon walking down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wearing one of those sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world is nigh? We’re struggling to see any.

Kerry, the Biden administration’s special presidential envoy for climate – an office that amounts to much less than a bucket of warm spit – is part of a chorus of fearmongering that goes back more than three decades. 

“In 1989 the United Nations gave us 10 years to save the world,” science site Watts Up With That posted last year. 

Guess blogger Eric Worrall then went on to list more than a dozen “last chances” to stop global warming.

“If we do not heed this last chance, I’m sure there will be another last chance in the near future, just like all the previous last chances,” he said.

Dire, way-off-base predictions have been the hallmark of radical environmentalism for at least a half century. Reason’s Ronald Bailey took “a look back” in 2020 at the first Earth Day and the forecasters “who got the future wrong.” He notes that the world did not have to halve the planet’s population or stop economic growth completely “to prevent the imminent ecological cataclysm.”

Nor have we run out of natural resources, been forced to shut down automobile travel, ban luxury items, and wear gas masks in urban areas due to air pollution (though the doomsters among us are happy that we’ve been forced to mask up for a least a year for another reason).

Despite the unbroken string of erroneous predictions, we still get nonsense from the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, which says “time is fast running out” to keep global warming at bay, and drivel from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who insists “we are on the verge of the abyss.”

That these people, including the John Kerrys of the U.S., who are as useful as a broken leg, have not been driven from their positions of influence and authority is a near tragedy. To the extent that we need political leaders, our country and our world deserve serious, sober-minded people leading our institutions, not the pretenders, narrative-pimps, self-seekers, virtue-signalers, mindless agitators, think-they’re-still-in-high-school attention-seekers, power-hungry louts, and batty alarmists who currently dominate. It’s discouraging to think that maybe soon we’ll have our last chance to rid ourselves of these malign characters, because they have a way of settling in like a distant family member who makes a surprise visit and then won’t leave. We need to start kicking them out now.

Monica Showalter at American Thinker quotes John Kerry’s “Net zero is not enough. We need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere”, to which Ms. Showalter responds:

Too bad about the plants.

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