Posted: Feb 12, 2019 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
The American media has focused recently on the newly released Green New Deal (GND), a resolution sponsored by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Ed Markey that would fundamentally transform America’s energy policy and move closer to their socialist vision for the country. As a resolution, the GND has no power to actually regulate or tax but gives left-leaning congressmen and potential presidential candidates a vehicle to virtue-signal their embrace of a radical, anti-fossil fuel agenda.
One day before the much-ballyhooed release of the GND, and flying mostly under the radar, President Trump made an announcement that could have more of an effect on green energy than the Cortez-Markey proposal — and in the opposite direction.
That was the president’s February 6 notice that he was nominating David Malpass to replace the outgoing World Bank president. Mr. Malpass, Treasury undersecretary for international affairs and former senior economic advisor for the Trump campaign, has been highly critical of the institution that he is now set to lead.
The current leader of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, made a surprise announcement in early February that he was leaving three years before the end of his second term. Kim left amid serious conflicts with the Trump administration over its decades-long trend toward investing in climate-change mitigation rather than in its original mission of reducing poverty. According to the World Bank, its dual mission is “ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity.”
The World Bank justifies funding of projects such as large renewable energy initiatives — detailed in their Climate Change Action Plan — with arguments that a shift away from fossil fuels benefits the poor through reduced air pollution. The bank states that it “joined the fight against climate change because it could push another 100 million people into poverty by 2030.” Their plan sets out “ambitious targets to be met by 2020, including helping client countries add 30 gigawatts of renewable energy.” In 2016 the bank announced it would spend 28% of investments on climate-related projects by 2020.
The World Bank aims to help the poverty-stricken, but in truth, it will be the poor who will most feel the burden of the policies the bank endorses. Backing of agreements like the Paris Climate Accord will reduce the availability of inexpensive, reliable energy that can increase prosperity for billions of the poorest. Nearly a billion people do not have the benefit of electricity and another billion have very limited access to the energy standards we take for granted in the western world. In addition, the living standards of all peoples benefit from inexpensive, dependable energy from fossil fuels.
Good. It’s not a move away from funding misguided green projects….it’s a move away from Marxism.
Indeed, let Common Sense prevail!
As usual Trump is completely out of touch. Millenials are demanding more action on climate change as opposed to old white men US sceptics who simply sit on their arses in front if their PC screens
School pupils prepare to go on UK climate strike
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/14/uk-pupils-climate-change-strike-headteachers-unions-schools
Sent via @updayUK
I’d be a bit more impressed if the school teachers and pupils went on strike at the weekend.
gilets jaunes
working class worst affected by green policies.
35–400ppm can’t be met without keeping Africa mired in poverty.
aaahhhh yes Ivan it is a proven successful strategy by every civilization in the World’s history…. let the children make all of the decisions and drive all policy! Ice cream and candy for everyone, no homework, no chores, unlimited allowance, and unlimited video game time!!!! Here Here!!! Let the children and childish lead the way!!
Cheers!
Joe
P.S. – no /sarc required!
If left to run things the millennials would only create a more hellish version of “Lord of the Flies”.
If you haven’t noticed … we’ve BEEN living those fictional accounts … in REALITY.
actually could change that to — “If lefties run things they would only create a more hellish version of “Lord of the Flies”.
Venezuela is a current realization of lefty policies in practice.
Cheers!
Joe
“Hear! Hear!” is misspelled and mispunctuated.
Every day I thank God for reliable electricity. Usually I can turn on whatever appliance I need to use, with full confidence that the electric current will not be interrupted or reduced; it’s there all the time. When I go to my doctor and have a scan or other measure taken, the electricity faithfully records my information. When I go to a store and buy something, the cash register works to record my transaction and memorialize it with a receipt. Without fossil fuels, I could not count on any of that to be completed while I am there; I don’t get stuck in an elevator, or the like. I’m thankful.
As usual Ivan is completely out of touch……Millenials are all over 20 years old now
And, as the Millennials pay larger burdens of taxes while raising their one children, their lazy entitled views of life are brought back to center.
Nor does it help millennials to stay progressive leftist, as they question much more seriously all of the alarmist dooms promised to them over a millennials entire lifetime. Claims that are repeated endlessly by the mindless.
Instead of alarmists staying with consistent messages, they have been reduced to claiming non-weather events, cooling events, ordinary storms and even inter-planetary ‘effects as climate change’ causated.
Fancy that. School kids taking an opportunity to skip class, with their teachers approval.
Not the be all and end all that your handlers want you to believe Ivanski.
Regardless, when millenials start paying their own bills, I’ll start taking their opinions seriously.
Wow what a moron…. a lack of good education is the problem…
Ivan you can march every teacher and student in the UK and you would still be wrong. Don’t know if your poor posting skills reflect your age or just your capabilities. The UK slipped behind East Germany (google it) under your ideas.
As usual Ivan is completely out of touch. He still thinks anyone cares what Millennials and other snowflakes are demanding this week.
A O-C has given us her Green New Deal, and the adults all shook their heads at the silliness of it all. The Left wing media runs endless ‘news’ articles about how Renewables are now cheaper then anything else, but only the Climate Faithful believe it. Trump is constantly vilified because he isn’t a believer, yet all the world leaders that DO claim to be loyal Climate disciples never actually do anything useful either. Obama could have gotten anything reasonable pushed through when the Dems controlled Congress, but he knew they would never actually vote for the kind of economy destroying plans that they all claim they want.
I’ll give A O-C this, she at least believes the silly Climate Crises nonsense, and isn’t just pretending to for votes. But if she really beleived that the Leftist politicians would support her GND if it had a chance in hell of being passed, she’s in for a major shock.
~¿~
because “ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity.” and green projects are mutually exclusive these upper middle class millennials you seem to know so much about are really only concerned with keeping the poor, poor and preserving the fossil fuel for their own special use. All this virtue signalling is never backed up with personal sacrifice. You Ivan don’t know these SJW millennials half as well as you claim. All hot air spewing, CO2 contributing bullsht
Ivan K mentioned
I suppose as opposed to young multi-racial, sexually-confused, Global-alarmist idealists who simply wave their arms in front of their iPhone X screens.
And, by the way, …”skeptics” NOT “sceptics”, and you typed “if” for “of”.
NOTE: Proper spelling is of paramount importance, when ribbing your opponents. Otherwise, misspelled words subtract from the rib — it’s like messing up the punchline of a joke [I’ve done both on more than one occasion] (^_^).
Robert
Ivan did spell ‘sceptics’ correctly. ‘Skeptics’ is just a US variant. Ivan has used normal English spelling – note he used ‘arses’ rather than the US variant ‘asses’ – which can be confused with donkey like animals.
Mind you, he got the rest wrong!
“Thousands of the more than 8 million school pupils in the UK are expected to walk out of lessons to show their concern about the threat of escalating climate change.”
First that is the idiots expect, not a proven fact. There is an excellent chance that very few pupils will play truant and a safe bet that no more that a hundred will actually attend a demonstration about climate change.
Even if thousands do play truant, that is from 8 million children, so if it is 8 thousand that is 0.1%.
The Children can not go on strike.
To go on strike one must first have a paying job.
If the children do not attend school their parents are liable for their truancy.
If they do not have a good reason for their children’s absence the parents can be taken to court.
To go on strike you have to with draw your labour.
If the teachers go on strike also they are in breach of their contract.
As a parent I am appalled by this action.
“old white men” It appears Ivan has irrational race, sex, and age prejudices. So last century.
Will Happer advised President Trump on climate, Ivan. Will’s little finger knows more physics than you do. Will is dead right on climate, and so is DT.
One suspects that most older white male skeptics of so-called climate change™ have better arguments for their position than you do for yours. Hence your need to argue from pejorative rather than reason.
Noting the Grauniad banner with ‘Greenpeace Jugend’ on it. The same Greenpeace funded by the wind and solar cartels. Follow the money…
Ivan,
To truly mitigate the effects of man’s input into climate, if any, would be to return the world’s population and technology back to roughly 1850. And it wasn’t a great time to be alive….
To do that in the final analysis in the 2+2=4 moment would be to line up every human and shoot every 6 humans, the 7th human lives. That is it. There is no other way to get there. There is no technology that currently exists to get there. So you are preaching for your own doom. I hope you also realize that only reason we able to communicate is due to petroleum and the organic molecules it gives the modern world.
Unfortunately there is – just look at the new mini nuke of the US arsenal – yield a few kilotons, less than Hiroshima. Small is better you say? – Nope,it just lowers the threshold for their use.
In about 62 minutes only a few hundrel million would survive, and wish they hadn’t.
Maybe Ivan likes the idea?
You mean left-wing Millennials.
Let’s review the impending catastrophe.
We’re about 2/3 of the way to 1.5C and the 1C warming so far has been accompanied by more people, more flora, more energy; more of everything that’s good and less of everything that’s bad (fires, hurricanes etc).
That leaves 0.5C to come over the next 12 to 32 years.
Ivan do you believe the additional 0.5C will trigger a sudden reversal in our fortunes?
If so, what’s going to happen to us?
Millenials, IK?
Or does the ignorant fool mean, Millennials?
next it will be snowflakes and all flakes.
Those who decide it is better to waste time protesting climate change, than to getting an education?
That is definitely their problem.
Meanwhile, why should rational people care about polls with a very limited set of questions that enquire a person’s general level of concern without defining, explicitly, what that level of concern means?
That is a bought and paid for piece of propaganda, not a real survey of concerns.
Especially when “People see U.S. power and influence as a greater threat in the Trump era“ is a greater concern.
An opinion driven strongly by major media publishing nonstop fake news and alarms.
Millenials in Russia, Ivan? That would be the only place you have any first hand knowledge of, right?
31% of millennials voted in the recent elections. “According to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016, the lowest percentages of registered and active voters are found among young people. Traditionally, America’s voter participation tends to increase with age, with 65-to-74-year-olds making up the most consistent and active group of voters in the U.S., according to U.S. Census data.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/2018-midterms-youth-voter-turnout-still-room-for-growth
Inasmuch as we live in a representative form of a Constitutional Republic, I think that the administration (as represented by Trump) has an obligation to respond to those who are voting, not to whiners. Why is a Brit telling us how we should run our government? I thought that issue was settled in 1783! Maybe you didn’t get the memo?
It was settled in 1783, 1812, 1865, 1945 and still the Brits try to “carry on” . The entire Russiagate coup sprouts from London. Willing collaborators found in every case since 1783. And that is not even mentioning 9/11, JFK, McKinley, Reagan, Harrison, Lincoln….
It’s a Republic, if you can keep it!
Ivan,
It is you and some Millenials that are out of touch. There is no Climate Crisis, but there is a logical thinking crisis. Nothing that humans do, can change whatever direction the earth’s climate takes. The only thing we can do is adapt to whatever comes. That adaptation will be easier if affordable electricity is available to all of earths inhabitants. The best thing that can be done for the world’s poor is to help their economies grow.
As for children, they only know what they have been told by their teachers, parents and social media. Teachers and social media have the biggest influence on their knowledge base. Unfortunately, today’s teachers are not the same as our teachers. Social media is just an electronic version of peers spreading rumors and misinformation amongst the group.
College students are no different than when I was in College. They don’t have the necessary life experience to make sense of what they are being taught and how it applies to life.
Ivan Kinsman
There is no climate scare.
No one has demonstrated by credible, empirical means that atmospheric CO2 causes the planet to warm. Every study so far has failed, including the Berkeley rubbish.
That simple fact reduces every claim of AGW, CC or whatever you want to call it to childish nonsense. Believe in it and you simply demonstrate you haven’t the sense you were blessed with when you were born.
Get used to it mate.
Now if only they read about the observations on climate change instead of focusing on the “projections” on climate change. They are all in Chapter 3 of SR5. It is just that you have to dig deeper for the observations.
Manipulating and filling children with scare stories is a pretty wicked thing to do.
IK,
And precisely why are massed children a better sign than largely invisible (but often wiser) old white men?
What is the profound significance of your observations here? Geoff.
They seem to hold Old White men responsable for the Enlightenment/Age of Reason, the Insustrial Revolution, Technological Revolution, Space Age…. IK, I aver that I had nothing to do with the advent of these developments, but I applaud them and am grateful for them.
as opposed to old white men US sceptics who simply sit on their arses in front if their PC screens
Ah yes, paint us all with the same brush, depict us as a uniform group who is lazy, of sub-standard intelligence, and evil intent.
There’s a word for that. I think its bigotry?
Some skeptics are not so old red women.
Ivan Kinsman: You genuinely believe Trump cares what a few thousand indoctrinated young virtue-signallers in Europe have to say. I mean, really?
Millenials are demanding more action on climate change
Who cares what a few kids living in their parent basement that have too much time on their hands due to not having a job demand.
People who work and pay taxes don’t want expensive schemes that will accomplish nothing but lining the pockets of the politically connected.
It’s no surprise the young and inexperienced are susceptible to the propaganda they’ve been feed all through their schooling. whereas those who deal with the real world on a daily basis to earn a living tend to leave behind such indoctrination as reality shows it for the lie that it is.
Well done! You managed to get your ageist and racist hate speech into the first paragraph. How is your ageism and racism relevant to the topic?
Oh Ivan, if you want to see a person completely out of touch, you will find one when you look deep in your mirror.
Who cares what millenials are demanding? They are the most stupid greenbrainwashed generation in the history of mankind. And you Ivan, if you are not a sceptic, you are a science denialist.
Almost everybody on this planet seems to think Donald Trump is just a stupid clown, yet he is the only leader who is showing his middlefinger to this AGW nonsense and he is trying to help. I like what he does. You can call me clown, I don´t care.
There was this climate meeting with world leaders somewhere in Europe. They came like leaders, flying their private jets. My president Sauli Niinistö didn´t go there but he send greetings to them. I was very short message, it went something like this: The way you talk, the way you do.
Sorry, It was… I´m old white man on his arse with cold fingers.
Excellent!
Another adolescent ‘social justice warrior’ is replaced with a sober minded and experienced adult chosen by President Donald Trump.
Hope Trump can keep righting the ship after 8 years of Obama trying to capsize it.
It will need a second term. DJT is working hard on common sense solutions, but it takes longer to work wonders.
Indeed, particularly when the swamp puts up roadblocks every step of the way. It’s amazing he’s managed to accomplish as much as he has given the obstacles he faces on a daily basis
People first. Science first. Not very pro-choice. With climate change, the prophecy of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming will need to be reframed.
It’s been re framed a dozen times already. They’re still confused as to why we don’t believe.
“joined the fight against climate change because it could push another 100 million people into poverty by 2030.”
Have to agree with Jimmy Kim that following their current policies the goal of pushing another 100 million people into poverty is achievable. Not only achievable but not nearly ambitious enough. GND implementation would push more than that number into poverty just in the USA.
Without cheap and abundant energy, adapting to climate change, whatever the cause, will be more difficult. Green energy is the opposite of cheap and abundant energy. The Kim World Bank appeared determined to create a world where poor people would not be able to afford air conditioning.
OMG, Ivan… The Green Dream nightmare is simply a toilet bowl filled with crazy, straight from AOC’s… umm, you get the idea. Flush it quick. It stinks.
On an electronic schematic, GND means ground, that is, zero volts, zero potential. How very fitting.
Circuit ground or earth ground?
… or analog ground, or digital ground, or RF ground?
There are standards based drafting symbols. example I can’t find anywhere the abbreviation is defined in a standard. That surprises me.
I thought earth ground had a standard, something like this
|
——
/ / / /
Imagine those squished together vertically.
There’s also
|
—–
—
–
Vs a triangle with the pointy end down.
I thought the last two were digital vs analog, but it’s been too many years to remember which is which.
Can’t recall that I’ve ever seen an RF ground.
Oh well, the system messed with my spacing.
Oops, the first one is chassis ground, which if your house is wired correctly will also be earth ground.
Wasting money … such as being forced to make home loans to unqualified borrowers … is NOT the job of a bank. Nor is it their job to loan money for projects that can NEVER pay the debt from their operations.
I think that is a misunderstanding of how the WB works and what it does. They make loans to governments that have been approved by the Bank loan preparation team and superiors (in line with policies) and approved by the relevant parliaments who commit to taking the loan and meeting the management requirements (which manage risk of malfeasance).
It is not a Donor organization through it can offer technical assistance to create conditions, understanding or make demonstrations to show the benefits of certain development projects or policies that need funding to work.
The payback may not be monetary. For example, if a project is funded for $1m that saves poor people $2m in expenses or in-kind benefits, that represents a good decision. If the benefit is $10m per year for an expense of $1m once, that’s a no-brainer. If they don’t have the $1m the Bank will lend it to them so the economy will grow by the avoided loss, and pay it back over 50 years or whatever. Many loans are on such soft terms that it is effectively a 70% grant.
The anti-coal policies have to date caused vast expense to governments trying to wean people off domestic coal consumption in the belief coal cannot be burned with very low emissions. Such policies are harmful for the very poor who have no choices, and who will not have choices for another couple of generations at least. I describe these people as being “beyond the last mile”.
Fortunately there are other voices in the WB who support pro-poor policies that deliver solid benefits. Lifting people out of poverty is everyone’s responsibility.
It is said there is a social cost of carbon (SCC). There is also a very much higher social cost of no carbon (SCNC). Professionals are acutely aware of the difference.
This new appointment is very interesting and unexpected.
Crispin,
I take issue with this assertion: “Lifting people out of poverty is everyone’s responsibility.”
I take no responsibility in either lifting or keeping anybody out of poverty other then myself. I take full responsibility of keeping myself out of poverty. The most selfish thing one human or a group humans can do to all the other humans is demand a free ride on top of not lifting to help themselves. My primary mission in life is to only be a burden to myself.
If all the migrants and refugees knew, knew that that 1000 mile march would be all for naught and lead to their death and destruction maybe they would have choosen to fight and gained some ownership and responsibility over their own lives and would have grown into better humans for the experience.
JEHill
You can choose not to do anything at all to help lift others out of their various forms of poverty. That does not lessen your responsibility as a member of the human family to do so. When all realise our common human family origin, our responsibilities are brought into sharper focus. Perhaps we could start the conversation by using a broad definition of “poverty”. There are those who are poor in spirit, in knowledge, in experience, in wisdom, in cash, or in assets.
I agree there are those who are poor in motivation. Your goal of keeping yourself out of poverty is admirable. If there were super-rich people taking away all you need to do that, then, accusing you of weakness of some sort would be inappropriate, correct?
If you were, at least verbally, to support the establishment of sound administration and court system in, say, Honduras, no one would want to become an economic migrant from there to somewhere else. And who prevents that? The super-rich in Honduras. Similarly, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Panama and so on.
Perhaps you will enjoy reading the book “Panama Papers”. That describes how the super-rich absolutely shaft billions of people each year, whatever their motivations and whatever efforts they make to prevent it.
One of the greatest disturbances to society is gross inequality of income (monetary). Doing something about it may require no more than giving assent to plans that will improve the situation.
Those all honorable goals but none of them will come to fruition. You will only be an enabler and keep those people in the chains they put themselves in. The problem can never be solved. I mean read some history. There have been the poor and down trodden at all points in history in every society.
I do help society by giving of my engineering brain to help other scientists/engineers fight diseases and I get paid, they get paid, and we all pay taxes which is redistributed to others. Some them of the not deserving.
As far helping directly, I have. Sponsored soon to be released prisoners. I learned why they are prisoners. Hard in your face lessons. I found myself being an enabler of continued bad decisions. No how many words or examples shown and lived by not one of them lifted a finger to help themselves; they took. An empty pit.
Over the years I also tried to help my sister and brother who by any economic measure are on the lower end. To this day my older sister has not figured it out; she’s 51. My younger brother is just now starting to show some progress at 45. I have given a few 10’s of thousands dollars to them. They only learned to take and take. Again I was an Enabler.
Giving anyone, anything with no cost attached teaches them nothing. It is impossible to value a thing that has no cost to person receiving and all they had to do was breathe. Those who have given the cost was and is high and there no is ROI even of the nonmonetary criteria.
And I saw these large swaths people in my Army days. Again they will not help themselves but they will take. Mostly they drain the souls of benevolent people and civilizations who are under the mistaken belief they are doing good works. We should practice the Prime Directive. You have choosen to be a victim of the Wizard’s 1st Rule by believing to believe that a belief is a fact.
Again, I reject that I am responsible to anybody but myself. I have very little control of things beyond immediate reach. I accept this.
Slow but steady progress in rolling back community organizer distortion.
But it’s too late in that China went out and created their own parallel version of the World Bank as effective move away from green-stupid run by DC (and John Kerry)
Note the idiot John Kerry looking on….
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/business/international/china-creates-an-asian-bank-as-the-us-stands-aloof.html
I was under the impression that the mission of the World Bank was to enrich cronies, prop up dictatorships, and make the poor even more miserable.
Yes, but that was when Obummer was president. There’s a new sheriff in town, if you hadn’t heard.
Sigh. Sounds like more winning. Again. Tired of it.
Not!
The bank states that it “joined the fight against climate change because it could push another 100 million people into poverty by 2030.”
I had to read that a couple of times before I realised it wasn’t an admission by the World Bank about their real agenda. Hmmm, or maybe it was. %^(
LOL. Yeah, that was an (unintentionally) illuminating wording choice
When the World Bank funds itself from profits instead of operating at a loss from nation donations I’ll view it as a bank instead of a welfare distribution organization.
World Bank sponsored power projects I’ve been involved with had much less stringent emissions requirements than plants built in the USA
I think I see the problem here:
‘The bank states that it “joined the fight against climate change because it could push another 100 million people into poverty by 2030.”’
In the above statement many may have thought the second “it” in the quote referred to climate change, but it’s obviously a reference to the World Bank.