Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Professor Simon Dalby thinks the way to discourage buying petrol cars is to decorate new cars with mandatory images of climate disasters.
Thank you for not driving: Climate change requires anti-smoking tactics
November 20, 2017 9.21am AEDT
ust before the delegates for the annual Conference of the Parties on climate change started meeting in Bonn this month, the Lancet, the leading British medical journal, published yet another major studyshowing that climate change is a growing health hazard.
The study revealed that hundreds of millions of people around the world are already suffering due to climate change. Infectious diseases are spreading faster due to warmer temperatures, hunger and malnourishment is worsening, allergy seasons are getting longer and sometimes it’s simply too hot for farmers to tend to their crops.
But what would happen if we treated climate change as a health problem rather than an environmental one?
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Many countries require packaging that alerts smokers to the dangers of the “cancer sticks” they are purchasing, and many cartons carry dire health warnings. In some cases, images of the grievous bodily harm caused by prolonged exposure to tobacco smoke must be printed on cigarette cartons. It’s all designed to discourage smoking and make plain the damage it causes.
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Like cigarettes used to be, internal combustion-engined vehicles are ubiquitous. According to advertisers, their possession and use apparently infers social status. Equated with freedom, despite the amount of time drivers spend stuck in traffic, gasoline-burning cars are supposedly the ultimate symbol of individualism, autonomy and power.
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So, how about a ban on advertising internal combustion engine-powered vehicles? No longer could they be shown as a symbol of glamour and sophistication to young people. Instead, the consequences of their widespread use could be highlighted.
Cigarette packaging displays health warnings, so why not have gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars decorated with images of disasters, floods, damaged buildings, hurricane devastation and the like?
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The Professor fails to explain what makes alternatives to combustion engine cars so green. Electric cars are particularly silly – it is ridiculously inefficient to burn fossil fuels, convert the heat into electricity, and use that electricity to charge a battery, compared to burning the fossil fuel directly in a combustion engine.
From the article: “The study revealed that hundreds of millions of people around the world are already suffering due to climate change. Infectious diseases are spreading faster due to warmer temperatures, hunger and malnourishment is worsening, allergy seasons are getting longer and sometimes it’s simply too hot for farmers to tend to their crops.”
What the heck are they talking about? Where is this happening? I would like to see some evidence to establish the truth of any of the above claims. All we get from alarmists are unsubstantiated claims which they expect us to accept as true.
I have yet to talk to a farmer who thinks it’s too hot to work in the fields, especially when running the combine for wheat, corn or soybeans means bringing home the bacon.
I’d go for pictures of natural disasters on the sides of my car—as long as they are all from the 1800s and I get to label them with the place and the date in large lettering.
Natural disasters, huh? Only if I get to choose them. I’d take Vesuvius and its umbrella of pumice and poison gases just before it collapsed and entombed Pompeii on the trunk. The 2004 Boxing Day quake (12/26/2004) at Banda Aceh could go on one door, and the 3/11/2011 Tohoku quake could go on the doors. And a flight of migrating geese being slaughtered by wind turbines on the hood would work, along with a Tesla burning up on the pavement.
Geezo Pete, whoever comes up with this stuff needs therapy something fierce!
I like the way you think!
Some people have too much time on their hands.
Once again, eco-fascism rears its ugly head. The desperation of the Greenie Climatist ecofascists is reaching a fever pitch now, as their cherished CAGW ideology is in its’ death throes.
The PRopaganda slush fund for the CAGW madness must be drying up for some reason.
Climate disasters…like Mann and Oreskes?
Would you drive around in a car with pictures of Mann and Oreskes? Isn’t that inviting disaster!
I think you need to be driving a hummer or a sports utility vehicle to get a photo if that inflated head into the front seat.
On another note, Mann’s Hockeystick was really done with tree ring proxies that were hairs from his head. Clearly there is a hockeystick going on there 😛
People would avert or cover their eyes and run into you.
shut up and buy that climate toothpaste 😀
WARNING: The US Climate Scientist General has determined that driving this car will cause plant life to grow slightly faster and may increase the risk that cold winter nights will be slightly less cold.
I’d like to ask everyone, especially those who sing their praises, “Do you own an electric car or, at least, have serious hands on experience with one or more? If so, what have been your experiences?”
I ask because my own experiences, though underwhelming, have been limited.
We have Anthony’s summation of his from his introduction to John Hardy’s articles two weeks ago;
“Full disclosure: I own an electric car, and I think they are useful for city transportation. However, having owned one for a decade, I can say it hasn’t been practical or cost effective.”
Considerably less than a ringing endorsement, but still a sample of one. So how about it everyone, what’s it like to actually use one? Not just read the yammer or take a joyride or two, but actually use one?
That works for me. What disaster should I paint on my car?
Oh! I know! A painting of an impoverished African village starving because fossil fuel used for agriculture is no longer allowed.
Or, a painting of a starving Chinese coal mining village ruined by coal policy.
Or, a vacated Inuit village abandoned because only electric cars are allowed, and batteries behave oddly at -50 degrees.
I know, I know. Algoreans only fear for the welfare of hypothetical “climate” refugees. They care nothing for real climate policy victims.
Too bad.
https://shar.es/1M3mex
Here is a real climate disaster in Puerto Rico. When you get to the section on Humacao, you can see what happened to the wind farm and the solar farm.
My favorite is the Christmas tsunami of 2004. That more than any other natural disaster in my experience drove home the undeniable point that when Mother Nature decides to do her thing you better hope you’re not in the way. A good reminder for people. And a walk in the park compared to the next ice age.
“It’s all designed to discourage smoking and make plain the damage it causes.”
It not only does not seem effective, it seems to excite and entice teenagers to do something dangerous. If it was branded “just stupid” rather than exciting and dangerous perhaps it would be less attractive to children and teens.
Nice 33 Ford! I’d take it over three or four Teslas, especially if it has a 5.0 liter Coyote engine..
Put a mural on the side of my car to scare/shame/”educate”/alert/etc. Fine by me, but let’s continue ….
We also need to tattoo the foreheads of publicly compensated yahoos that may be in control of educating children, like this guy.
The tattoo needs to be visible/legible from 20′ away & clearly warn what can happen if zealots like this are allowed to spread their propaganda into the mainstream, unchallenged. Maybe a caricature of adolph and/or the guy that trashed Venezuela (too bad he couldn’t have lived to see what he did).
Sounds like a new twist on the kind of niceties Ozzie smokers face now when they buy their very heavily taxed but legal cigarettes.
I’m a non-smoker by the way.
https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/australia-prevails-over-philip-morris-in-cigarette-plain-packaging-case/
When introduced to Canada years ago, they were treated like collectors cards.
I may have failed to see the comment, but there are those types who would love to have disaster pictures on the side of a car. Some disaster pictures would be popular, and probably command a premium in price. This would be a boon for the collector market. Hey, gotta get them all. If it works for pokemon and children, it would work for adults and cars. Where do I invest?
At the Petro Canada where I buy gas, they have a “Please use our fuels responsibly” decal on the pumps, I ignore that too.
I’ll take a lightning strike forest fire, made extra large by not allowing logging and letting the forest get too old and susceptible to fire.
In prof Darby’s world, purchasers of ICE cars with the fantasy disaster pictures on them, would be jailed or even executed for repainting their cars. I actually believe the big three would sell more cars because of a stronger contrarian sense in Americans relative the sheeple, er, people of other countries. I just know the car’s pictures and tex t would be artfully doctored to make fun of the noble globals. In fact an exellent new business start_up would be a kind of car tattoo parlor with book full of gags.
JOSH GET A HOLD OF YOUR BRUSHES AND GIVE US A LA GH ON THIS SCORE.
Or Josh, open up a business to custom cartoon the cars with your climate spoof. You would become a millionaire. Automakers could be turning out models: the Ford Tornado, the Toyota Seeoto, Mercedes Benzene, com’on WUWT wags must be able to make a list!
Yeah, right. How about testing it with Volkswagen first?
In re comments concerning
“[I]t is ridiculously inefficient to burn fossil fuels, convert the heat into electricity, and use that electricity to charge a battery, compared to burning the fossil fuel directly in a combustion engine.”</ib
Economically, “efficiency” has a mathematical definition and it does not concern scientific definitions.
“Efficiency” is where marginal cost equals marginal benefit, MC=MB.
This is where social benefit is maximized. If MB>MC, too little is produced/consumed since society values another unit of output more than resources, or if MB<MC, too much is produced/consumed since society values resources (or alternative outputs potentially produced/consumed) more than another unit of output. Opportunity costs must be minimized.
The statement is generally true by revealed preference and the fact that few consumers buy EVs and producers sell few, less than 1% market. If it was false, there would be a huge profit in EVs, cheaper than internal combustion to buy and operate, similar to how cars are more efficient than horses and a grain bag instead of a gas tank or battery supported by an electric power plant. The market normally decides what is efficient, not a bunch of scientific or social engineers. This is allocative efficiency as opposed to Pareto, x-, or dynamic efficiency and the general definition is MC = MB maximizing societal welfare or the transformation of scare resources into the highest valued level of output(s) or most valued by society. It is the holy grail for economists.
We should look at all costs and benefits, not just those born by producers and consumers which normally get to the efficient level of production/consumption.
There are distortions like tax credit subsidies which are not true [negative] costs favoring inefficient overconsumption of EVs. There are also externalities. Darby argues some sort of perceived negative externality in the form of “suffering due to climate change .. Infectious diseases .. warmer temperatures, hunger and malnourishment .. allergy seasons are getting longer .. too hot for farmers to tend to their crops” and offers the solution “why not have gasoline- and diesel-fueled cars decorated with images of disasters, floods, damaged buildings, hurricane devastation and the like?” as an embarrassment factor or cost on consumption working like what we would call a Pigovian tax on consumption of internal combustion powered cars. It is a misunderstanding by him to compare it to cigarettes since that labeling solution is more an informational failure solution on consumers assuming they do not know costs of smoking as opposed to second hand smoke plus ignoring tort liability of cigarette manufacturers.
This is the same old externality/efficiency argument since day one decades ago with AGW claimed negative externality like pollution giving cause to carbon tax inasmuch as a tax on leaded gas.
I would argue that Darby is incorrect. CO2 is not a pollutant. It helps plants grow and is socially beneficial. If AGW existed from gas powered engines, that may be beneficial too in what we used to call the interglacial optimum or look at the Medieval warming period as opposed to cold of Maunder Minimum. AGW does not exist from the data on temperature, there has been no significant change in global temperatures since 1994, in fact negative anomaly as of this week (https://moyhu.blogspot.com/p/latest-ice-and-temperature-data.html#NCAR) and global cooling in prior decades to late 1970s when all were worried about devastation from and ice age when we massively expanded driving cars and pumping out CO2 is opposite direction for correlation with no claim on causality of CO2 on AGC. There is similarly no evidence of increased fires, floods, bad weather, and the opposite concerning hurricanes and crop damage. Also, EVs produce more CO2 than internal combustion engines due to upstream emissions and battery production. Worrall is entirely correct on the efficiency statement and Darby wrong, otherwise (and ignoring hypothesized fictitious externalities) we would all be buying and driving EVs since the fixed and operating costs would be cheaper than gas powered internal combustion vehicles which it is not.
Also note, while gas powered cars ended being more economically efficient than alternative renewable horse powered transportation, there were similar prior arguments about negative externaiities in big cities by horse excrement and dead animals left in the street Ike abandoned vehicles and health concerns. A similar Darby argument would be signs put on horses when people drove them with pedestrians stepping in crap, getting sick, or dead carcasses rotting in the street.
I am in between if Teslas should be labeled with their overall CO2 emissions higher than internal combustion type cars and painted like deserts or with dead plants, or if all gas power vehicles should be painted with fields of green plants. I vote no to anything, and hate the pundit experts and costly perceived “solutions” to non-existent problems. If we followed them, we would have nuked the ice caps in the late 1970s to “solve” the global cooling problem. I have a problem with anthropogenic caused idiocy which can spread like religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs