Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Vox thinks the Republicans are torn between young members who want climate action, and older members who oppose a new carbon tax. But Vox are overlooking something important.
Frank Luntz vs. Grover Norquist: the GOP’s climate change dilemma in a nutshell
Republican ideology is on a collision course with public opinion.
By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Jun 21, 2019, 10:10am EDTThe Republican Party is in a bind on climate change.
On one hand, it has spent decades denying that global warming is a problem and is ideologically opposed to all the public policies — taxes, investments, and regulations — that might solve it.…
Frank Luntz warns that the GOP is being left behind on climate
…
- “58% of Americans — including 58% of GOP voters under 40 — are more concerned about climate change now than they were only one year ago. The appetite for seeing real action is palpable to voters of both sides.”
- “Three in four American voters want to see the government step in to limit carbon emissions — including a majority of Republicans (55%).”
- “69% of GOP voters are concerned their party is ‘hurting itself with younger voters’ by its climate stance.”
…
Grover Norquist warns the GOP not to touch a carbon tax
The pressure to be productive on climate change is starting to get to some Republicans. Recently, Mitt Romney let it slip that he was open to a carbon tax.
In response, Norquist pulled together a group of 75 conservatives, mostly from various think tanks and right-wing advocacy organizations, to sign a letter to Congress. Here’s the full text:
We oppose any carbon tax. A carbon tax raises the cost of heating your home in the winter and cooling your home in the summer. It raises the cost of filling your car. A carbon tax increases the cost of everything Americans buy and lowers Americans’ effective take home pay. A carbon tax increases the power, cost, and intrusiveness of the government in our lives.
The letter was signed by such notable conservative intellectuals as Thomas Pyle of the American Energy Alliance, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Phil Kerpen of American Commitment.
…
The issue Vox and the Republican progressives are overlooking is that carbon taxes, green solutions simply don’t work.
In 2014 engineers working for Google tried to find a viable pathway for the world to embrace 100% renewables. They failed.
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Before anyone suggests “yes but prices have fallen since 2014…”, not that the Google engineers looked at hypothetical cost saving solutions well beyond current technology, such as self assembling wind turbines which erect themselves without human assistance. They still couldn’t get the numbers to add up.
Why is there such a deep divide between younger and older generations?
Part of the reason I suspect is that older generations remember past failures. It is not just the climate deadlines which have come and gone, with no disaster in sight. Older people also remember all the failed carbon taxes and renewable programmes which never produced any value.
You see, this isn’t the first time the USA attempted a green revolution.
Jimmy Carter’s Solar Panels: A Lost History That Haunts Today
By John Wihbey
Tuesday, November 11, 2008…
For President Jimmy Carter, it had been nearly three years of tough fighting for clean energy. After a long rollout of green tax credits, the creation of a nascent Energy Department, and a pledge to conduct the “moral equivalent of war” (at the time, spoofed by critics as “MEOW”) against an energy crisis, Carter had built up scars. And there would be more to come. He had had battles with Congress and with his political enemies over green issues. But he had some victories, too, and this day brought one more, a small moment of symbolism.
Solar panels, some 32 of them, were on the roof of the White House. The set was just right – the sun had come out for the press as though for a stage call. Tape rolled, the cameras snapped.Self-conscious about his own idealism, or perhaps just realistic, the President gave voice to his doubts about the panels: “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
The point of all this was simple, Carter said. America was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”
…
Read more: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2008/11/jimmy-carters-solar-panels/
Politicians who commit the nation to green energy end up being blamed for the inevitable failure. Politicians who fail are remembered as incompetents.
The quote from Ross Koningstein and David Fork’s Google RE<C project "Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” is not the full sentence in the source document https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
The full sentence is “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.“.
Like it or not, it makes an important difference. [NB. The quote is preceded by a preamble which does make staving off catastrophic climate change the context, but the preamble is not as highlighted as the quote.]
I my mind no it doesn’t … you are just spinning to try and save the hoax …
ya the author made the stupid mistake of linking to the document he butcher quotes out of.
Like we wouldnt read the quote and see that the Google engineers are talking about an entirely different issue
Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work
vs
[R]enewable energy technologies simply won’t work
in the context of assumed necessary CAGW mitigation. Doesn’t look too bad though not a perfect quote.
Now that I have nuclear grid connected I will continue.
There is some difference between the two, but the key is clear, you can’t reduce CO2 emissions to zero using renewables like solar, wind, biomass.
That there could be a future renewable that does it, well they can’t rule it out anyway, nor they investigated if the whole idea is necessary in terms of what, say 600ppm of CO2 in atmosphere will do. That was outscoped as a broad and uncertain question.
My opinion is that the core result is solid – they did their best. The (my) conclusion is we should agree to use nuclear as safe and almost carbon dioxide emission free energy. We should also stop using renewables as a principle, but develop new energy sources with investments in promising or proved ideas like pumped hydro, new nuclear technologies, fracking.
Also: no-one can promise expensive mitigation is a good idea compared to simply adapting to for example sea levels, what ever they are in 2100.
Are the incompetent because they failed, or did they fail because they are incompetent.
PS: This is by far not the only Carter fail.
Ah yes. Jimmy Carter,.. I remember him and his policies well.
I graduated with by ChE degree in 1974, and drove my brand new Chevy Malibu Classic across country to my new position with Atomics International,.. an Rockwell Division. My mission was to develop Liquid Metal Cooled Fast-Flux Breeder Reactors which at the time was a promising solution for the country’s energy woes.
What a disaster the efforts to develop alternative energy sources were back then. The reason for this was very telling,.. namely because the moment the government lost interest in research , (Carter left office)__ all funds and interest dried up. Companies quickly learned from and applied the lessons they’d reaped from the work they’d conducted. We quickly moved on to coal gasification as applied to high sulfur coals obtaining promising results. ( Spoiler: They turned out to have zero interest in investing any money of their own.)
Back then, the focus was NOT on Carbon Dioxide at all, but instead the sulfur that was liberated, thus “Acid Rain”! That was the great bogyman then. This was the early efforts by the Globalists to determine what they needed to focus on until they finally brainwashed enough of the youth in the universities so that the injected”Intellectual Ignorance” based propaganda could take on a life of it’s own.
At this time, even the communists themselves were astounded by the fervor the the movement took on once it was sparked by the social justice creed they kept feeding the media and universities. Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, loved Jimmy Carters naiveté and would often remark to his foreign agents how astonished he was that America’s leftists had quickly become malignant to the society. The movement’s results far exceeded what the communists thought they could ever have hoped for and did so at a much faster pace than they had foretast.
This is what we are suffering from today and the only cure is “Light”. In other words for the American people to be shown what has been going on behind the scenes over the past 100 years at least.
It is amazing how close the parallel is when I compare communism to malignant cancer. Both start a a single cell and for a time remain very small even to the extent where the body’s defenses kill them off. But once they achieve angiogenesis they quickly explode in their growth rate.
So the answer seems to be:
1.) Awareness that there is actually a problem which can become lethal if not addressed and understood for what it really is.
2.) Cut off the “Blood Supplies”.
It thought I’d share a bit of my story with WUWT readers and friends, Once again I appreciate everyone here who come to dialogue with other inquiring minds. You are all so inspiring. Thank You.
Charlie A,
Please embark on a series of stories about your past experiences. Hands-on histories are an asset that the young cannot possess. Only older, experienced people like you and me can describe what was tried, what failed succeeded and why. This reduces the need to reinvent the wheel.
Also. I often tell of the weak intellectual base of the Greens. Of those I have fought in Australia, many are drop-outs from one educational system or another. Few have met hard Science; soft humanities are not much use for the task of design of future global electrical generation.
Tell others about your experiences as often as you can. It helps. Geoff
If they are really serious about lowering CO2 emissions then they need to replace fossil fuel power plants with nuclear power plants. But the reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing has been very small and is caused by the sun and the oceans. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. So even if mankind stopped using fossil fuels world wide, the climate would keep changing as it always done in the past. But even if mankind could somehow stop the climate from changing, extreme weather events and sea level rise would continue because they are part of the current climate. An optimum global climate has not been defined so even if Mankind could change our climate to something else we would not know what to change it to. This is all a matter of science.
there are 2 climate extremes, an ice age and only ice at one or more poles (everything else is weather) … period … we are going from a ice age to not an ice age … that is the only climate change occurring … humans have thrived in not an ice age climate … there are NO bad outcomes for humanity as a whole or the planet in a climate opposite an ice age …
Vox is a joke. I’ve written a few things that their writers commented on, and those critiques made it clear that they hadn’t understood what I had written. Why learn to read when you can easily build carbon-neutral straw men? A totally laughable organization, but far from alone in that regard.
I cannot overstate the potential impact that the most recent scientific studies regarding the imminent Grand Solar Minimum will have in these tumultuous matters.
The NASA Ames Research Center just released a study validating the work of Dr. Valentina Zharkova regarding Solar cycles and the sun’s magnetic fields.
This new study – headed by Irina Kitiashvili- comes to the same conclusions as Zharkova.
The appearance of noctilucent clouds, the observable dearth of sunspots, the extended winter seasons all give powerful evidence that this Globull Warming scare is unfounded.
Learning of – and spreading the word – may be a highly effective tactic in ending this collective madness.
“ . . . not that the Google engineers ”
Seem to me the word “not” should be the word “note” – – thus becoming:
Note that the . . .
This whole thing is ludicrous and based on the false premise that CO 2 is harmful. CO 2 increases follow warming not the other way round. Puny man has no way to influence the climate. It has always changed and always will. The current increase in CO 2 is increasing crop yields, a good thing. We are as likely to be heading into a global cooling as warming so let’s drop all the foolish solutions to a non problems which we would be powerless to influence anyway.
An absolutely useless metric.
An absurd claim that does not bear any resemblance to polls conducted over the last thirty years. Leaving readers to wonder what statistic fallacies vox used to attain such absurdities.
Another numerical claim that does not relate to major polls.
Nor is anyone seriously worried, as even today’s millennials, snow flakes and woke sjws will grow up. Usually about the time they find out how much hot water actually costs, how cold it gets without heat and cooking is downright tough without fossil fuels.
We’ve simply experienced a lot more weather for starters-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/winter-records-broken-as-melbournes-thick-fog-icy-temperatures-going-nowhere/ar-AADis4r
and recognise that whitefellas only rolled up in 1788 and it was only around 1910 that a whole southern hemisphere continent had a reasonable Stevenson Screen rollout and not a touchscreen one as a younger generation and their educators seem to presume.
Bemusingly after lecturing us oldies the sky is falling in the next breath they’ll segue into how we should pay homage to the indigenous folk who were here anything from 40 to 60 thousand years with only an oral history and no thermometers. If the touchscreeners are right then the ample scientific evidence of climate change in Gondwanaland in that time is all down to aboriginal cooking fires and traditional burnoffs to flush out game but where’s my sorry and compensation I ask?
In fairness to the time of the Carter White House, the USA was facing
a energy crises. The massive use of private transportation coupled with
the then almost total dependency on foreign oil was a true energy
crises.
The fact of the young thinking in a different way to the older person goes
back to at least the time of ancient Egypt, with comments about it on many
of the remains of that culture still visible today.
As a example I myself at age 14 years . I had just left school and started
work, normal in 1941, t here was a War on, and Hitler had invaded Russia.
Churchill immediately promised all aid possible to the Soviets. When
challenged by some as to his well known hatred of he Russians he replied
that he would make a pact with the devil if it helped him in his fight against
Hitler’s.
Then we had Hollywood producing films such as “”Mission to Moscow” the
recollections of the US ambassador to Moscow. This film portrayed all
the purges in Russia, the “Show Trials” as correctly dealing with the bad
people. Uncle Joe was a good guy.
So naturally I thought that Communism and its carbon copy Socialism
was wonderful, but as I grew up and saw for example what Socialism did in
practice such as the post war Labour government in the UK from 1945 I
slowly changed my mind.
In effect I grew up. Today I am very right wing in my thinking. I realise
that its not perfect, no government political system is, but its a lot better than
the left wing versions.
In regard to the left wings obsession with renewable energy, what about the Trump government setting up a “”Pilot scheme””. Plenty of spare land in the USA.
As the Greens are against Dams, no hydro power to help hem out, the only
choices are windmills and solar. Of course they can be asked if they would
like to add Nuclear power to the mix, but of course they will refuse.
So then invite the Green types to come and live with the power available
from those two sources, and lets have massive government publicity about
how they manage.
If they refuse as I expect they will its not a total loss, it is still a power
source but very inefficient, the output figures should of course be
published.
As to where is the money to come from, that’s easy, just take a large
percentage from all the government grants to the various Climate studies,
referring them to the Pilot scheme instead for their studies. In fact thy
could actually choose to live there as a real life experience.
So what to call this Pilot scheme, what about “” Sun City.”
MJE VK5ELL
Actually, Carter and his Party partisans made things worse in energy policy. Go do the research on Carter and Howard Metzenbaum–I did academically and professionally.
A joke from the Carter era.
The people of Plains Georgia are eating peanuts this Thanksgiving.
They sent their Turkey to Washington.
Their greatest accomplishment was in airbrushing from history the other Carter nominee to head the Federal Reserve–before Volcker.
I am not a scientist. I have no idea id this CO2 thing does effect the climate or not. We have developed a different take on this CO2 that is going into the atmosphere out of the combusted fossil fuel exhaust.
We want that CO2. All of it. Not a slip stream like Petra Nova or Boundary Dam. We want All of it. We turn that CO2 into full time good paying jobs and money. That’s it. We don’t need any steam or heat from the power plant. We will need a small bit of electricity. Less than 1%.
We will manage the CCU System from start to finish. The Utilities will monitor their CO2 emissions and collect on their Q45 tax discounts.
How is this done? https://youtu.be/RQRQ7S92_lo
This train needs to be stopped in its tracks. Period! No more ‘can’t we all get along’ to avoid ‘ruffling feathers’; no more political nuance. Remove the politics — politicians are inherently self-serving even when their noses are rubbed in the fact that they’re chasing failed computer modeling. Discussion and debate on this issue is pointless since the media insists on misreporting it. Every credible (and responsible) person, understanding this threat, who does not stand up on his hind legs and assert himself is hastening the demise of a great country! Time to take a stand, OUT LOUD!
Mitt Romney doesn’t represent the Republican Party thinking on climate change or tax increases.
The roots of Green political strength are rooted in resentment of the oil cartel and it’s economic and social consequences to the West. Climate change is just one branch of 60’s and 70’s fears and collectivist Utopian government control fantasy. It’s populist Marxism such as it is. The spoiled English arm chair leftism that dominated the affluent certainly through the later 19th and early 20th centuries while the British empire rotted.
It’s the elite that support globalist “climate change” policy. Media, academics, crony business parties and a spoiled but threatened establishment claiming moralistic power. That the oil cartel is corrupt at the root, OPEC, certainly enhanced the Green wing in the 1970’s in particular. A global free market without price fixing, production quotas and world politics are a core of the reactionary Green movement.
You have to look at why central planning has a particular base of support. Climate is just one of many tools in this cause. Monetary policy and central banking are the precursors of the coming climate authority model, another disaster for individual freedom.
President Trump tweeted today
“China gets 91% of its Oil from the Straight, Japan 62%, & many other countries likewise. So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries (many years) for zero compensation. All of these countries should be protecting their own ships on what has always been ….a dangerous journey. We don’t even need to be there in that the U.S. has just become (by far) the largest producer of Energy anywhere in the world! The U.S. request for Iran is very simple – No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!”
It is true, America’s -Freedom of Action is entirely due to the President’s climate and energy policy. This success is threatened by the current wave of anti – CO2 hysteria and law making see EG https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/20/18691058/new-york-green-new-deal-climate-change-cuomo
My approach – based on the likely Turning Point in the Millennial natural cycle at about 2004+/- ,rejects the consensus science approach and the associated forecasts entirely .This would provide a useful basis for supporting Trump’s cyclic approach to the science and his wish to maximize US energy production.
See http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-co2-derangement-syndrome-millennial.html
Quote “……..The reality is that Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths.
It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of where the earth is in relation to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities which fall into two main categories.
a) The orbital long wave Milankovitch eccentricity,obliquity and precessional cycles which are modulated by
b) Solar “activity” cycles with possibly multi-millennial, millennial, centennial and decadal time scales.
When analyzing complex systems with multiple interacting variables it is useful to note the advice of Enrico Fermi who reportedly said “never make something more accurate than absolutely necessary”. The 2017 paper proposed a simple heuristic approach to climate science which plausibly proposes that a Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity was reached in 1991,that this turning point correlates with a temperature turning point in 2003/4, and that a general cooling trend will now follow until approximately 2650.
The establishment’s dangerous global warming meme, the associated IPCC series of reports ,the entire UNFCCC circus, the recent hysterical IPCC SR1.5 proposals and Nordhaus’ recent Nobel prize are founded on two basic errors in scientific judgement. First – the sample size is too small. Most IPCC model studies retrofit from the present back for only 100 – 150 years when the currently most important climate controlling, largest amplitude, solar activity cycle is millennial. This means that all climate model temperature outcomes are too hot and likely fall outside of the real future world. (See Kahneman -. Thinking Fast and Slow p 118) Second – the models make the fundamental scientific error of forecasting straight ahead beyond the Millennial Turning Point (MTP) and peak in solar activity which was reached in 1991.These errors are compounded by confirmation bias and academic consensus group think.See
See the Energy and Environment paper The coming cooling: usefully accurate climate forecasting for policy makers.http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0958305X16686488
and an earlier accessible blog version at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html See also https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-millennial-turning-point-solar.html
and the discussion with Professor William Happer at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2018/02/exchange-with-professor-happer-princeton.html
Well, if Google engineers can’t make the green dream add up, then there’s no hope. Hurray fo WUWT!
MarkW, Kaiser Derden, fred250, Samuel C. Cogar:
Where you boys at???! Looks to me like y’all ran away! I’m still waiting for your predictions:
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2019/06/lets-see-who-knows-what-theyre-talking-about.html
And Conservatives LIE to pollsters. We don’t trust them to ask fair questions, or to accurately represent what we tell them.