Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Former Republican governors John Kasich and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and former Secretary of State John Kerry have teamed up to create “World War Zero”, an initiative aimed at driving conservative interest in climate action.
It’s Time for American Leaders to Wake Up to the Threat of Climate Change for the Good of the Planet and Business
BY JOHN R. KASICH AUGUST 3, 2020 11:55 AM EDT
Kasich was the governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019.…
If we could have seen the pandemic coming and had the power to prevent it, of course, we would have. If we had that power but sat on our hands as millions became sick and died, that inaction would be unforgivable.
There is another problem that we know is coming, that we have the power to address, and yet which we continually do too little—or often nothing—to tackle. I’m talking about climate change.
…
I joined with former Secretary of State John Kerry and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger behind an effort called “World War Zero” to help bring together a group of unlikely allies – Democrats, Republicans and independents, scientists, military leaders, business leaders, diplomats, entertainers, and ordinary people from all walks of life – to mobilize, speak up, and tackle climate change together. And to find new ways of helping people appreciate the need to address the problem.
Seeing the economic benefits of renewable energy investments at a time of a global recession might not be an angle that first comes to mind. But tough problems merit different approaches and demand that we take advantage of the opportunities when they arise—like now.
…
Read more: https://time.com/5873394/take-climate-change-seriously-business/
“World War Zero” wants net zero emissions by 2050. I couldn’t see anything resembling a carefully costed plan to achieve net zero, the site focus mostly seems to consist of lots of positive thinking, and reminiscences about the spectacular debt fuelled growth of the 1940s wartime economy.
Kasich’s claims of economic benefits from renewables are questionable. If renewables provided any short term “economic benefits”, if they were a genuinely profitable opportunity, there would be no need for the government to step in and support renewables.
Regardless of the alleged long term benefits of renewables, in the short to medium term additional government support for renewables would be a drag on the economy.
The last thing the USA or anywhere else needs right now is even more short term economic pain.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Former Republican Governors
They were rhinos anyway — prb’ly short on media exposure & laundered money.
“There is another problem that we know is coming, …”
They think that they know; however, it is really a belief that they, and others like them, are unwilling to defend in public debate with people who do not agree. I seriously doubt that any of the three could effectively defend the claim in open debate with any knowledgeable skeptic. They are grandstanding and trying to seem relevant after they have had their ten minutes of fame.
Last January Marxist darling AOC called for World War against climate change. She called it “our World War II”.
That’s atrocious arithmetic. Three follows two, not two again or zero.
But it’s so much worse than that. These crazies yearn for World War. They have romantic delusions about mass slaughter. John Kerry wants to arm the insane authoritarian theocrats of Iran with nuclear weapons, and now he publicly calls for World War. It’s not mere lunacy, it’s psychotic warmongering.
God forbid these crackpots get their wish. Red Flag Warning: mass murderers on the loose.
Three idiots, two RINOs (republicans in name only), and one socialist democrat. Why can’t these people get some common sense and learn that CO2 is not a pollutant, but beneficial to the environment. Also learn that CO2 and methane are not the control knob for climate change/global warming, etc. Learn to read some of the data !!! They also believe in the 97% consensus. . .
– JPP
Don’t forget that the Socialist Idiot is living COMPLETELY off of his RINO’s wife’s dead husband’s money.
So all three are taking money from Republicans to spout socialist clap trap.
Well the climate “crisis” is solved! Kerry will call in James Taylor to sing ” You’ve Got a Friend” and all will be well. It worked in France, didn’t it?
Just add a plentiful supply of “Gore” to these three Horsemen of The Apocalypse and Hey Presto! World War Zero.( Where’s Rocky Balboa when you need him?)
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s single claim to authority is that he won a series of beauty contests when he was young. It’s as if we had decided to put Jayne Mansfield (who, for you younger folks, was a minor movie star in the fifties who had a spectacularly exaggerated female body) in charge. Schwarzenegger never learned to act. He wasn’t even athletic-watch him move and he is slow and clumsy. He was beautiful in a grotesque, lurid way, and that was most of his talent.
Grr, grr. I really can’t stand the guy. He claims that he can speak standard English, and maintains his Austrian accent only because his fans expect it. Yeah? Recite the preamble to the Constitution and pronounce the words in it as if you were born in Connecticut, pal.
Ho! Ho! Stop ducking the question.
Ha ha, off-topic maybe, and about as believable as a paper with Michael Mann’s name on it but no it’s true, I met Jayne Mansfield once. I was 12. She was really nice, talked to me and gave me her autograph with a big heart over the “i” in Mansfield. Tragic events happened soon after that.
Where were we again? Oh yeah, I don’t think I can add anything further to what has been said about these three attention-seeking clowns.
He used to tip his housekeeper regularly. In fact, he had a son with her.
Ian,
Arnold’s politics, like his acting, was always better when he kept his mouth shut. Far better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool…
The law firm of Huey, Lewey, and Dewey wants to represent you against your local energy suppliers whether you want it or not.
Are you sure it isn’t the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe?
Correction: former RINO governors.
If you find yourself aligning with John Kerry on just about anything, you probably better rethink your ideas.
Former Republican governors John Kasich and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and former Secretary of State John Kerry have teamed up …
Very rich, old, white guys demand … DEMAND?
Yup, if you can dissimulate sincerity, you can feign anything.
Yep, at the top of the pyramid of the campaign to discredit old white guys and especially rich old white guys are, you got it, rich old white guys, and you can throw senile old Joe into the mix too. How TF did we get here ??
“If we could have seen the pandemic coming and had the power to prevent it, of course, we would have.” Like these are new? Lots of evidence that we should have, and would have like in addition to quarantine rediscovered, let’s try more homework, less celebrity stuff. See if they can spell epidemiology.
When I was a kid people who claimed to be able to control climate were not considered the smartest around, some were were trying to con you.
If you add the IQ’s of all three of those bozo’s together whadaya get? …………..ZERO
A sorry group of has-been Politicians.
“The last thing the USA or anywhere else needs right now is even more short term economic pain.”
… for no gain.
The virtue-signalling RINOs should be confronted with a dose of reality, one that’s simple enough for even them to understand:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/what-causes-rising-atmospheric-co2/
Notice that John Kerry was not included.
This isn’t science, it’s a sales pitch. Now, why might they need a sales pitch if the ‘science is settled’?
John Kerry does not learn from his Freudian actions of throwing his medals over the fence (it was because he knew he did not deserve them … not because the war was ‘wrong’ and his government betrayed him). He has stayed a giant lying hypocrite his whole life.
Kasich … oatmeal, without butter, sugar, or salt; but batshit crazy. Batshit crazy oatmeal.
Swarshinager. Passive aggressive wimp narcissist; and you need to hide the maid if he comes to visit on a regular basis.
All in all, still just as knowledgeable and compelling as any of the other climate action leaders.
He didn’t even throw his own medals over the fence.
Yeah, Kerry’s medals was reportedly safe at home in a display case.
He’s such a liar. One of the most detestable people I can think of.
“It’s Time for American Leaders to Wake Up to the Threat of Climate Change”
And to wake up to the oddity that this threat requires activism all the way up to the pope and that after 30 years of this kind of browbeating it still isn’t working and apparwntly requires fearmongering by has-been politicians.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/22/old-climate-fears-revisited/
From the above article’s boxed excerpted quotes of an article written by John Kasich, former governor of Ohio :
“If we could have seen the pandemic coming and had the power to prevent it, of course, we would have. If we had that power but sat on our hands as millions became sick and died, that inaction would be unforgivable.”
Mr. Kasich, you obviously have never heard the phrase “the Web never forgets.”
Here is a link to a pamphlet released by FEMA in July 2018 that shows this US governmental organization considered a pandemic striking the US as a very real possibility as late as July 2018, only some 18 months before COVID-19 struck this country:
https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1537897784532-95e513b308bdcfb52711a97a9882507c/brochure_pandemic_ncp_508_082918.pdf
The pamphlet is titled: “Continuity Planning for Pandemics and Widespread Infectious Diseases”
And then there is this:
“A simulation for a global pandemic response involving more than 40 countries will take place 4-6 December, 2018, coordinated by the World Health Organization’s Global Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and by the EOC Network, a global network of health emergency operations centres. This is the first global pandemic response training exercise . . . This experience will identify gaps and areas for opportunity that will ultimately help in the assessment and improvement of Member States’ readiness to respond jointly and effectively to a global public health emergency.” source—https://www.who.int/ihr/eoc-exercise/en/
Since the US was a major supporter of WHO at that time, we can assume that US emergency preparedness personnel actively participated in this exercise.
So, Mr. Kasich, since you were governor of Ohio up to January 14, 2019, can’t we rightly assume you had some working knowledge of FEMA? How then can you pretend that you could not have seen at least the possibility of a pandemic coming? And how is that, knowing that possibility, you effectively “sat on you hands” and let the State of Ohio—just as other governors in other states did—remain unprepared for a pandemic, such as COVID-19. I agree completely with you that given such facts your INACTION is unforgivable.
Please don’t try to sweep this away by now becoming one of the “saints” calling for action on climate change. As the saying goes “By their acts, ye shall know them.” However, I can appreciate that, like those other pastured politicians Kerry and Schwarzenegger who you are joining, you desperately need to be in the public spotlight on something.
Finally, and most significantly, there is this shocking New York Times article about operation “Crimson Contagion” that provided all the warning necessary that the US was unprepared for a pandemic: “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded”, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html
Embedded in the NY Times article is a link to a draft of the full debriefing report on these exercises (marked “Do Not Distribute”) that ran from January to August, 2019. You think that wasn’t timely vis-a-vis COVID-19 hitting the US?
The total incompetence of so many of our “leaders” is thusly revealed.
What happened in the process of “Covid tests”, that is simply PCR reactants. I hear these are easily made, and PCR is a very simple operation, and everything for Kung Flu PCR was either on the shelves or easily custom made.
But the reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change we are experiencing today is very small and is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Current climate change is so small that it takes networks of sophisticated sensors decades to even detect it. One must be careful to not mix up weather cycles that are part of the current climate with true climate change. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the conclusion that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. So all of this proposed reduction in CO2 emissions will have no effect on climate. But even if we could somehow stop the Earth’s global climate from changing, extreme weather events and sea level rise would continue because they are part of the current climate. We have yet to establish what the optimum climate is let alone how to change it. So even if we found a way to change our climate, we do not know what change to make to benefit mankind. There are many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them. We would all be much better off if we concentrated in improving the global economy rather than waste time and money in the name of climate change.
listen to these economists?
4 Aug: Guardian: Letter from economists: to rebuild our world, we must end the carbon economy
Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, Clair Brown, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Robert Reich, Gabriel Zucman and others.
The carbon economy amplifies racial, social and economic inequities, creating a system that is fundamentally incompatible with a stable future…
Governments must actively phase out the fossil fuel industry…
This letter has been signed by more than 100 economists. See the full list of signatories here…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/04/economists-letter-carbon-economy-climate-change-rebuild
My problem with this sort of climate change dogma being preached by politicians and ‘celebrities’ is not that we know its nonsense but why don’t THEY know?
I think the reason “they” don’t get it, is they are not critical thinkers. They get too wedded to a narrative and can’t mentally shake loose from it. Instead, they practice confirmation bias which makes them feel so much better about things.
Net Zero! Wouldn’t we all be dead?
You mean former Republicans Kasich and Schwarzenegger? They were never conservatives.
Kasich continues to act out because Trump is president and Kasich barely registered with the public.
Arnie? Isn’t he dead like his marriage to Maria Shriver?
Yup…former RINOs is more like it.
That marone! Millions got sick and died? On what planet? Is he on some planet other than this one?
Millions, my fat Aunt Harriet!!!
Here’s the statistics to date 8/4/2020:
USA Deaths from CV19 to date: 155,942 to date
Worldwide total mortalities: 695,550 to date
Source: Johns Hopkins University , Center for Systems and Science Engineering
Comparison between flu and CV19: death rate
Deaths: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
COVID-19: There have been approximately 694,715 deaths reported worldwide. In the U.S, 155,478 people have died of COVID-19, as of August 4, 2020.*
FLU: The World Health Organization estimates that 290,000 to 650,000 people die of flu-related causes every year worldwide.
People may say ‘Covid is nothing like the flu’, and in many ways they are absolutely correct.
For a start the Flu kills more people.
People die. It is tragic for those near and dear, but also part of life. You can only cheat death for so long so the important question is not ‘how do we safe lives’ but ‘how much are we prepared to sacrifice in order to save lives’.
“But Wait!” you cry. “That is cold. No one would think like that!”
Sorry, but we already do. Remember the common factor with road deaths is the road. 100% of road deaths. By extension the way to reduce road deaths to zero is to 100% ban the use of roads.
“But,” you cry again. “That is impractical.”
Exactly.
Context is everything.
COVID-19, to date, is indeed nothing like the worst of the flu.
In the single month of October 1918, the Spanish flu (one strain of influenza) killed 195,000 people in just the United States . . . a fact that is not widely known.
In comparison, in the seven-plus months since January 2020, COVID-19 has been ascribed as the cause of slightly less than 160,000 US fatalities.
The annual death toll from flu in the US ranges from about 12,000 to 60,000 . . . the annual worldwide death toll from flu ranges from 290,000 to 650,000 people.
Influenza has cycled annually from epidemic to pandemic status from more than 100 years . . . and in all that time, humans have developed neither “herd immunity” nor a very effective vaccine against the various strains of this virus.
Some quote about the “lessons of history” could be inserted here.
Two observations to make here.
First – All three of these people are ‘former’. So before they were ‘former’ they, one assumes, were in positions of power, responsibility and ownership of problems. Now they are not and while they now lack power, they also lack ownership. Demanding action on something you have no ownership over is very easy. You don’t own it. You don’t have to pay for it.
Second – World War Zero. Wow. Let us quote a few numbers
Great War (World War One) : 16 to 40 million
Second World War (WW2): 56 to 80 million
Frankly calling yourself World War Zero is pretty tasteless.
For light relief,you might like to watch ” Spitting Image “The Arnie Song “1991 available on u tube!