Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Greens usually try to sidestep questions about the cost of their proposals, but occasionally they slip up and reveal the true pain their agenda would inflict on ordinary working people.
Behind the smokescreen, the Coalition’s stance on climate change hasn’t changed at all
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Saying you agree with the science of climate change but that you believe the government’s current plan is adequate is like saying you agree with vaccination, but you chose to only get one of your three kids immunised because, heck, that is more affordable.
Greg Jericho
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The cheapest way to deal with the cost of climate change is to reduce our emissions and prevent, as much as is possible, further increases in global temperatures.
Dealing with climate change will be tough – people will lose jobs, the prices of some things will rise, but the cost of inaction is going to be much greater and more damaging – both to our economy and to our society.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/18/behind-the-smokescreen-the-coalitions-stance-on-climate-change-hasnt-changed-at-all
This admission that climate action is expensive and would cause hardship echoes Obamas speech in 2009, in which he promised to make electricity prices skyrocket;
I applaud Guardian author Greg Jericho his honesty, but not his judgement.
It is easy to talk about hardship in abstract terms when your job is not on the line, but we don’t have to look far to see what a serious commitment to climate action would do to the lives of ordinary people. The government of California has ruined the lives of thousands in their manic quest for climate leadership.
But surely all this pain is worth it, to save the lives of our children?
The problem with this argument is there is no evidence further global warming, if it occurs, would inflict significant damage on the global economy.
2C of warming is the equivalent of moving around 160 miles closer to the equator. In the Northern Hemisphere you can experience a 2C warmer world by driving 160 miles South.
What you will also see if you drive South is a lack of dead people. The people you see 160 miles South of your current hometown, or even a thousand miles South, will mostly be doing just fine, going about their ordinary lives much the same as you do. Although you might see more old people – older people frequently move to warmer climates, for better quality of life.
As for sea level rise – if an alarmist like President Obama doesn’t take sea level rise seriously, why should you?
My point is, there is no good reason why even one job should be lost to the effort to address the alleged climate crisis, until climate action advocates come up with convincing evidence that there is actually a problem.
If The Guardian is not a credible source it’s not a credible source. Not consistent to embrace them as credible when we agree and not credible otherwise. I think the whole of the MSM has a climate agenda that makes it impossible for them to be an objective analyst of the climate change issue.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/06/24/cjr/
“****and to prevent as much as possible further increases in global temperatures.”
Faith is belief in things you can’t see. I live just north of Chicago. I didn’t get any trick or treaters this Halloween because where I live there was a snow storm on Halloween. It never snowed on Halloween when I was a boy. This morning the thermometer in my backyard is reading a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit. I simply don’t see any global warming. Matter of fact I don’t see any trend in the weather. I don’t think anyone else does either. Faith is belief in things you can’t see.
“Dealing with climate change will be tough – people will lose jobs, the prices of some things will rise”
Wrong, the cost of every single item will rise because they all need to be transported by fossil fuels ! PERIOD !
The Skid Row in Los Angeles is not a recent development.
There you go again, Eric, using those logic tricks you like to use. Feelings! That is what’s important.
The funniest part of that whole article by Greg Jericho was the statement
Why would Australia want to take a leading role on the international stage?
If you assume there is a solution then it follows there is absolutely no upside to being a leader and considerable downside. The first country to master the transition will pay a massive inflated price compared to other countries that will simply follow the model. The general public want to be followers not leaders.
It is like leftist who want Australia to be a greater and better player in the UN … and they can’t understand why the general public are repelled by that idea. At the moment if the Australian public got a vote on it they would likely want out of the UN. The two big main reasons for the sentiment shift is
(1) Lack of the UN being able to do anything meaningful with Russia and the downing of MH17
(2) UNHRC attacks by UN on Australia over it’s refugee detention policies
To continue the thought of “LdB”, above the statement by Jericho,
is one repeated over and over by millions of people — many of whom are not stupid. It suggests thinking completely ignorant of how even genuinely good ideas diffuse through society. Rogers back in the early 1960s studied diffusion of innovation and found that the first “innovators” (I put that in quotations here because of context) are often ruined. It is the second wave of innovators who do well. This second wave are composed of people who have observed the problems and catastrophes suffered by the innovators, and do not wish to suffer similarly. Thus, they hang back until bugs are worked out.
The urge to plunge into “doing something” about climate change is not necessarily even a good idea in my opinion, but supposing it were, everyone, even those not fully aware of why they were doing so, would hold back to see how it all worked out for the innovators. It is a sensible approach to hedging of huge uncertainty.
There seems to be a race to see who can economically self destruct first. The UK and Germany seem to be leading the pack early. But there is still room for others to move to the front on global stupidity.
It appears that arguments based in reason and founded on observational evidence have no place in the global warming debate. It has become a purely faith-based cult that has far too much influence on politics and society for the safety of both people and the biosphere they inhabit. It was never enough to observe that there has been some very welcome but modest warming coming out of the little ice age, and that human actions and CO2 emissions may have played some potentially minor part in that. In spite of all evidence to the contrary it has to be cataclysmically dangerous, end-of-times inspiring and an excuse to drop everything the human race has been doing for the past several centuries to make life on the planet better for us and our fellow flora and fauna. Somewhere deep in the primal heart of humans there is a need to believe that all is lost and only our mass suicide by stupidity will cleanse our souls. “Believers” total Ignore the hypocrisy of claiming this is all for the good of the earth when any simple reasoning shows that 7.7 billion people trying to survive the collapse of society will not be a friendly event for any part of the natural world. “Climate-change deniers” (a nonexistent breed of humans) are guilty of relying on facts and observations rather than swilling back the cool-aide and joining in the Armageddon chorus.
Dang it do I detest these leftist pigs. Disgusting hoodwinked creeps.
Not just jobs
The Guardian also reported this for the UK. We could do with some warming.
“Last winter, there were nearly 46,000 excess winter deaths among people aged 65 and over – a shocking 92% of all excess deaths – equating to 379 older people a day. These distressing figures are now the highest we’ve seen in over 40 years.”
“In the Northern Hemisphere you can experience a 2C warmer world by driving 160 miles South.”
Or climbing a 600 ft hill.
Mrs May (an erstwhile British Prime Minister) proposed mitigation measures that will cost £15,000 per head. Old and young, children, wage slaves, toffs and peasants, £15,000 each. Some can afford it easily, some will struggle, some — the old, the poor and the sick –will fail to keep warm in winter and suffer the health consequences.
JF
This isn’t as convincing as it sounds, in my experience Jericho pretty much gets everything wrong.
In answering the direct question on the cost of its climate policy Bill Shorten answered. What is the cost of doing nothing? No matter what the real answer is in dollars, when a politician gives you this evasive an answer you know it has a 1 in the front and heaps of zeros. This non answer was an important part of the reason that the Labor party lost the unloseable election in Australia.
The other point in your post which is that why is 2 degrees of warming even bad? I can’t understand how people have been able to be freaked out by such a concept. For decades now the ability to lower or increase the temperature has been at the touch of a button. Not just 1 or 2 degrees different but 10 or 15 degrees : it’s called air conditioning . The only way that this ability of humans to not create the “perfect” temperature is if electricity becomes either too expensive or two unreliable. In a recent hot spell the breakdown of our air conditioner gave me a taste of how we take that ability to adjust the weather for granted.it was extremely uncomfortable for a few days till it was fixed.
I have always thought rather than fight against climate change ( if you believe in it) a better and cheaper solution would be to continue to use the cheapest source of electricity generation ie coal make it available to as many people around the world as possible and buy everyone who can’t afford it an air conditioner. Without doing the sums I suspect it would be significantly cheaper than trying to change the climate with windmills and solar panels and electric cars and getting rid of cows.
“Greta Warns World Leaders at Climate Protest Before Davos”
“Lausanne (AFP) – Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg issued a warning to world leaders at a protest in the Swiss city of Lausanne on Friday, days before the start of the Davos summit of the world’s political and business elites.”
“So far during this decade we are seeing no sign whatsoever that real climate action is coming,” the 17-year-old eco-warrior said to a rock-star welcome from the mostly teenage crowd.”
“Greta Thunberg: “This is just the beginning. You haven’t seen anything yet. We assure you of that!”
https://www.breitbart.com/news/greta-warns-world-leaders-at-climate-protest-before-davos/
Getting desperate ?
Maybe the general public inertia and disinterest in the ‘climate question’ will crack up as the policies start to affect real world jobs and expenses ( already have w electricity prices but gradual and not necessarily connected in their minds) and people will ask serious questions about the facts. Maybe things like Prof David Kelly’s GWPF paper showing UK ‘decarbonisation’ to be ludicrous will GAIN TRACTION.
The climate change people have an unseemly, barely disguised enthusiasm for ruining other people’s happiness. Consider Canada’s carbon tax: You can read any twenty randomly chosen articles extolling the tax and not one will state outright that the tax is designed to make operating a gasoline-powered automobile so expensive that many people who can now afford to drive will have to give it up. Now and then an environmentalists slips up and says that a given emission suppression protocol will be the equivalent of taking thousands of cars off the road. Of course, that’s thousands of cars driven by working class people, who are probably unjustly happy already, because their I.Q. scores are too low to understand that they should be living in fear of the future, like all the smart people who can afford to fly in airplanes, or buy electric cars.
Show me an environmental activist who has ridden on a city bus in the last five years.
“But surely all this pain is worth it, to save the lives of our children?”
And we do that by removing the very fuel that allowed more children than ever to survive. Where did 7 billion people come from?
It’s too bad that economic changes and progress has destroyed entire job sectors. All those miners digging for coal, and the jobs they created in the NHS dealing with emphysema and other diseases, and then of course the effects of smog which also led to boom periods of employment for undertakers.
Before we had cars, there were people employed to collect horse dung from the streets. Talking of such things, emptying cess pits was also a career before mains drainage. I’m sure lots of people regret the coming of sewers, it was far more convenient to empty a chamber pot out of the window into the street below.
OK, serious point now. transitions in technology render old jobs obsolete and create new ones. the printing press. the steam engine. spinning, knitting, and weaving machines. steel works. 3d printing. electric vehicles. solar power.
You’ve got to learn to get on and ride the bulldozer of progress, or, be crushed underneath.
I think young Greg might be about to be ‘spoken to’ by his social betters.
Consider this line from the article:
“… and prevent, as much as is possible, further increases in global temperatures… ”
As much as possible.
There you go, in young Greg’s own words we only have to do as much as possible. And since it is impossible our work here is done.
Pack it up Climate Kids. Job’s over.
Eric,
Last Friday the Sydney Morning Herald had a feature article on tackling climate change in a “ real way” on the part of the Federal Government. As with the Guardian it said that the necessary action would be tough.
In answer to the perennial question, “ How much will it cost?”, the article quoted Professor Ross Garnaut’s Review(2011).
According to Garnaut it will cost “one third to two thirds of the growth in Australia’s annual GDP going forward”.
I don’t believe in such economic forecasting as there is no way anyone could make such a projection that is reliable.
But the amount?
If the GDP growth is 2.9 % (2017-18) or say now 1 to 2%, and GDP is even say $2.9 trillion the amount being one third to two thirds thereof is a manageable few $ billions.
What a snip with still remaining economic growth!
But there are significant doubts and this is only the domestic cost.
How much are we exposed to internationally by signing up to Paris?
Heaven only knows.
This is way of topic, but it is a fascinating video on the potential of water memory. … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VyUsVOic0
The Greens will even eat their own it seems-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/germans-are-slamming-elon-musks-plans-to-clear-740-acres-of-forest-for-a-dollar4536-million-tesla-factory/ar-BBZ88I7
To my dear friends in the Virginian Colonies, this is slightly OT, but listening to & then watching Breakfast tv on radion then tv, the not-so-good old BBC, I note that they truly do stick to their Royal Charter of impartiality like no other, referring to President Obama as precisely that, yet nearly always refer to the current incumbent of the White House as merely Trump! Curious!
“Although you might see more old people – older people frequently move to warmer climates, for better quality of life.”
Oh no! How long before we see headlines screaming:
“Research shows that the climate crisis will result in more older people”
Researchers have determined that increasing temperatures result in an older population. This could have a devastating impact on Medicare, Medicaid, and the cost of healthcare. “If we don’t immediately end all production of CO2, this will soon be a country of geriatrics. The science is unequivocal,” said Dr. Mannsfried, as he boarded a private jet to a crucial conference on global warming in Fuji.