by Paul D. Hoffman
The headlines tell the story, and it’s not a pretty one. Climate realists, like me, are losing the climate change debate. Not because we are wrong. Factually, we win every time! But, we are losing the hearts and minds of the people because we have failed to tap into their emotions.
The climate alarmists don’t care about the facts. They beat us down with children, like Greta Thunberg, and lecture us about self-interest and our cowardice in the face of a “mass extinction event.” They play to our natural emotions and worst fears by linking climate change to those uncontrollable things we are most afraid to face—hurricanes (lions), wildfires (tigers), and tornadoes (and bears, oh my!).
Despite these facts:
- Climate change models have failed to accurately predict the future global average temperature change.
- There is no ideal average temperature for a world where on any given day the temperature could be -50 degrees F in one place and 120 F above zero somewhere else. (Remember, if you live by averages, you would be comfortable standing with one foot on a block of ice and the other in a fire.)
- Global average temperatures have fluctuated much more and have changed much faster in the geologic past and well before humans started burning carbon-based fuels in significant quantities.
- Weather patterns are much more attributable to cyclical changes in ocean currents than to climate change.
- The use of oil, gas, and coal creates a significantly higher quality of life for billions of people, reduces poverty, provides abundant food supplies, and means cleaner air and water.
- There is overwhelming evidence that climate change is neither caused primarily by humans nor an existential threat to mankind or any other species.
Despite all this and more, we are gradually losing the battle for the minds of the people when it comes to the climate change debate. And we are not just losing the debate at the political level. We are losing in the board rooms, and not just the woke corporations like Amazon, Nike, Apple, or Google, but in the corporate board rooms of the utility companies, the oil & gas industry, and the manufacturers.
Why?
We tend to make our case using wonky science that even scientists don’t fully understand. People can’t get their heads around our rational explanations, but they darn sure understand fear of events that may affect them directly and personally.
We tend to argue about the adverse macro-economic effects of climate change policy—the loss of millions of jobs, green energy costing trillions of dollars, and the failed goals of wealth redistribution. These effects are real and catastrophic.
However, have you ever wondered why the voters do not support Social Security or Medicare reforms, despite the overwhelming macro-economic evidence that both systems will likely be bankrupt within the next decade? The answer is fairly simple. People make decisions based on micro-economics, not macro-economics. People will choose to protect their personal benefits over the solvency of the system—every time.
Consider these examples of the micro-economic impacts of climate-change policies. Here in Virginia, Dominion Energy is closing coal-fired power plants in favor of solar and wind farms, and this move toward renewable energy sources will lead to a $1,000 per person per year increase in electric bills by 2030.
Ask anybody if they are willing to pay a thousand dollars a year when it is not likely to change the average global temperature at all? This question brings the issue home, and the answer will much more often be a resounding “No!” Ask the same person if they think climate change is a threat and whether we should do something about it, and you will get many more affirmative responses.
The Transportation & Climate Initiative, a regional collaboration of 12 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states plus DC, is proposing a 20-25% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions for the region. Their policy of choice is a “carbon [dioxide] tax.” Recently, Virginia enacted a carbon dioxide tax on utility generation, and the General Assembly will be considering one on transportation fuels that may include a 28 cent per gallon gasoline tax and a 26 cent per gallon diesel tax. Based on current mileage rates and miles driven per capita, these tax increases could cost each driver more than $1,000 per year! Once again, I can fairly easily predict the response from most people to the question of whether they are willing to pay another $1,000 per year for no material effect on the climate.
People expect their lights and their computer to work when they flip the power switch. Talk about the potential for rolling brown-outs, or planned black-outs, so that someone else can charge their electric vehicle at the charging station built with tax dollars (ever seen a government-built gas station?), and I think you will get a predictable negative response.
I am certain that we can come up with many more examples, but my point is this: let’s take the case against climate change down to the personal, micro-economic level. Remember the charge against George H. W. Bush: “It’s the economy stupid!” It wasn’t that Bush didn’t understand that there was a recession; it was that he failed to recognize how that recession affected people at the personal level.
To put it another way, everything in life is political, except politics, that’s personal. When you explain how a policy threatens someone’s pocket book, you’ll get their attention.
Paul D. Hoffman has been involved in environmental policy making and communications throughout his career. He has served as State Director for then-Congressman Dick Cheney, Executive Director of the Cody Country Chamber of Commerce just outside Yellowstone National Park, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks at the US Department of the Interior. He is currently the publicist for Hope Springs Media and a consultant for Resource Management Strategies. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Biology from the University of California at San Diego, Revelle College. He wrote this article for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
This sentence sort of undoes your argument. At some point facts, i.e. that the efforts are inadequate to the stated task, enter and then emotion has to be left behind. How does one get the Karen’s of our world to put emotion aside for a moment of rational reflection. I have only two examples of my arguments with left-wing people in the past two decades which caused them to reflect for a moment and admit they had not considered all the facts. These were both men.
Fracking has a big impact, but the Obama policies, continued and expanded by most Blue States, is the main reason the shut downs occurred. No climate agnostic CEO shuts down a functioning coal plant immediately to switch to NG based on financial analysis, the payback and IRR wouldn’t justify it. Long term replacement and overhaul decisions would have been impacted, but that would have been a much slower shut down time frame.
Part of the problem is that the costs of Climatism build up slowly and steadily. This is partly endemic, and partly by design. People are less apt to either notice, or care much about costs increasing, as long as they happen relatively slowly. And if they do notice, they blame the wrong people. For example, when electricy rates go up, who do people blame? Why, it’s the greedy power companies, of course! And, if people feel pinched economically more and more, why then it’s “rich people” and “greedy corporations” who are to blame, of course. They don’t see the Green Filth with their hands in the pockets of all, dragging us down, and laughing all the way to the bank.
The end game for the madness of crowds which in these times is personified by the belief in grid scale renewables can be predicted by Mazlo’s 5 Hierarchy of Needs –
basic life sustaining stuff
shelter & safety
companionship (rumpy- pumpy)
esteem (peer acceptance / groupthink?)
self actualization (artistic pursuits, self indulgences, body art, identity focus)
Developed western populations have largely attained Dr Mazlo’s 4th and 5th levels – so now free to not worry about the basics of life.
But if the madness of renewables is left to fester to the stage where people have to revert to worrying about food, warmth, movement, cleanliness and other basics, they will soon demand and pursue the means of sagsin satisfying these needs so as to once again enjoy the higher levels of the heirarchy.
It will run its course but take time.
@Mr.. “It will run its course but take time.” Unfortunately by then the socialist will be in control, will have removed all traces of the second amendment and setup internment reeducation camps.
It would take an armed conflict to overturn our Constitution.
It would only take a couple of liberal justices to render the written document completely meaningless.
First they declare that the 2nd amendment only applies to people in the national guard.
Second, they declare that Freedom of Speech doesn’t cover hate speech, and the government gets to decide what is hate speeh.
Third, they declare that freedom of association doesn’t apply to hate groups, and any group that opposes the government is a hate group.
The constitution is a pretty weak reed to place all of our faith in. It can be gotten rid of quite easily, and with thunderous applause from those who believe that more government is the answer to every problem
Like I said: “It would take an armed conflict to overturn our Constitution.” There are more guns than there are people in the U.S.
Like I said: “It would take an armed conflict to overturn our Constitution.” There are more guns than there are people in the U.S.
Sky News Australia allows climate sceptics to air their views on television. MPs are often seen in the Australian parliament speaking out about bogus climate change claims.
Do Australian governmental climate change policies differ that much from those nations who suppress dissenting voices?
Pocketbook nah, surely no price is too high to save the planet. Also , if it saves just one kiddie……
The only thing that will the energy argument is to be smacked in the face by blackouts, especially if they happen or are feared to happen near an election cycle. Although now with the ability to better “manage” elections , at least in the US, that fea goes away also.
Wind and solar produce power 25% of the time. Even if it were possible to build enough to replace fossil fuel 100% this power would be available only 25% of the time and fossil fuel would be required 75% of the time. There is no way around it.
Wind or solar cost 1100% more to build and require 100% fossil fuel back-up 75% of the time and the power produced costs 300% more. A combined cycle natural gas power plant costs 50% more and cuts emissions 50 to 60% as opposed to the 25% of wind or solar because a combined cycle provides power 100% of the time.
Combined cycle cannot be used as back-up to wind or solar as they cannot ramp up and down to accommodate the wild swings of wind or solar.
Wind or solar systems partnered with single cycle NG produce 25% more carbon emissions, require 25% more use of fossil fuels. Oh, and they kill many hundreds of thousands of birds, hawks, eagles, bats and many endangered species each year.
So if you like 300% higher cost, higher carbon emissions, don’t like birds and want to waste fossil fuels
[quote]”Wind and solar produce power 25% of the time. Even if it were possible to build enough to replace fossil fuel 100% this power would be available only 25% of the time and fossil fuel would be required 75% of the time. There is no way around it.”[/quote]
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Are you sure about this? Wind and solar might produce power approximately, on average, around 25% of the time, depending on the location. In some locations, perhaps 30% for wind and 20% for solar, and vice versa in other locations. However, if we have wind and solar power in many different locations, separated by distances as much as thousands of kilometres, and all connected with High Voltage Direct Current lines, preferably underground or under sea, then wouldn’t we have a power supply 100% of the time?
No. And at what cost?
On topic from James Delingpole at Breitbart.
Delingpole: No, Lying BBC, Britain’s Weather Isn’t Getting Wilder
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/12/delingpole-no-lying-bbc-britains-weather-isnt-getting-wilder/
Our Republic will survive this latest assault on reason, as it has survived past assaults: The War of 1812 and other external wars, the War Between the States, Woodrow Wilson, Prohibition, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, forced busing, 9/11, Obama and etc. And, always remember, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that our 2nd Amendment of the Constitution (one of the original 10 Amendments that keeps government out of our individual, pre-Constitutional rights) protects our natural right to self defense and the individual ownership of all types of arms currently in common use by citizens, independent of any State militia. Chew on that, would-be authoritarians.
I’m fighting back with ridicule of stupid “science.”
If a climate tax is implemented and the dividends are given back to us, you can be sure that the poor will get more than they pay. You can also be sure that the bulk of the money the poor gets will be from the middle class.
Seems to me that if we frame a tax and dividend scheme as a way for the rich to keep their money while getting the middle class to pay to help support the poor, this would put the brakes on a tax scheme. Alternatively, if a tax/ton is put on carbon, make is so that the more you make (or more richer you are), the more carbon tax you pay.
Either way, we have to screw the rich on this since it is them who wants to screw us by making us pay to help support the poor.
Some simple graphics would do, for example, a graph of US working age population vs (income and estimated carbon footprint). From there, you could get a picture of how much each income class emits in CO2 (I have seen these CO2 emission vs wealth studies already). You take that emitted CO2 and covert it into the carbon tax ton cost and then you graph this cost over income group. What you’ll see is that the bulk of the revenue would come from the middle class due to the sheer higher numbers of middle class vs rich people. But the rich people would have bigger carbon footprints.
Just frame a carbon tax as a scheme to save the rich money while effing the middle class because this is actually what is happening.
Great picture to accompany your article, Paul Hoffman. Since your article advocates creating buy-ins that reach across the emotional and intellectual divide, I’d like to think some of the powerful anti-woke images are being created BY skeptics – smart folks you work with perhaps – rather than the constant repurposing of art and photography from other people’s ad work.
Is there a by-line or attribution for this image?
The fact that the Earth is greening under the effects of greater CO2 and warming is sooner or later going to shake the woke world. It undermines alarmism absolutely.
The green crowd cannot argue against what they claim as sacred ground. The efflorescence of chlorophyl-bearing life on the planet is Gaia’s smile. If the pseudo-scientific need something that can easily be seen there are the satellite photos. It is irrefutable science. It will eventually defuse their best emotional arguments. It is actually happening during – and because of – a period of mildly warming climate and rising CO2, and it doesn’t matter which came first. It’s glorious, it is right. It is good.
(End sermon on the mount)
Is there a boxer in the house?
Yes, I do realize that the picture is posed.
I have seen pictures of people who were supposed to be boxers with their wrists cocked at an angle. Shouldn’t that result in a broken wrist?
“Is there a boxer in the house?”
I saw a professional boxer last night who has a fight record of 17-0, and he knocked out all 17 of his opponents in the first round. After watching him destroy his opponent last night in two minutes and thirty seconds,knocking him down three times in the process, I can understand why he has that record.
Now the biggest question about him is not will he win the fight, but will he win the fight in the first round.
Btw, the guy that got knocked down three times and eventually knocked out, had never been knocked down in any of his previous fights, until that night.
“Weather patterns are much more attributable to cyclical changes in ocean currents than to climate change.”
Major heatwaves are discretely solar driven, without which they would not occur, and they drive the ocean phases inversely, with positive NAO/AO conditions driving La Nina conditions and AMO cooling. This negative feedback rules out climate tipping points.
A big problem is the weaponisation of the Met Office, who claim that our 2018 UK heatwave was made 30 times more likely by human induced climate heating. It is false attribution such as this which drives the climate impacts myths, which then generate the climate crisis hysteria, to generate the laws and the cash flow. The irony is that many UK folk would welcome the long hot summers that we must now go green to avoid according to the MetO climate projections. It’s not going to happen though as all our heatwaves are discretely solar forced, I have predicted nearly all of them since 2010.
This covers why four out of the five hottest UK summers in the last 50 years happened when they did. The inner bodies order the weekly-monthly scale anomalies:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/major-heat-cold-waves-driven-key-heliocentric-alignments-ulric-lyons/
From the article: “Despite all this and more, we are gradually losing the battle for the minds of the people when it comes to the climate change debate. And we are not just losing the debate at the political level. We are losing in the board rooms, and not just the woke corporations like Amazon, Nike, Apple, or Google, but in the corporate board rooms of the utility companies, the oil & gas industry, and the manufacturers.”
I heard the Ford Motor Company say in a commercial yesterday that they did not “Deny the Climate”. This was during a promotion for their new line of electric cars.
So is the Ford Motor Company taking a swipe at skeptics of the Human-caused Climate Change narrative, in their commercial? I would say, yes, they are.
To the Ford Motor Company: You can build all those electric vehicles, but can you sell them? You should probably be careful about trying to force products down people’s throats. That’s not good public relations, which is not good for business. You’ll be woke and broke!, if you are not careful.
To all Automobile companies: If you guys are so woke and concerned about CO2, why are you building autombiles with gasoline engines that produce 400 and 500 and 600 and 700 horsepower? Shouldn’t you be buildig little dinky gasoline engines? Oh, that’s right, noone would buy them if you did, would they.
You automobile companies ought to stick to satisfying customers demands rather than trying to force products down their throats. Leave that to the politicians.
I like my gasoline-powered automobile. It’s going to be a big fight trying to take our cars away. I don’t think you can do it. You can propose it, but you can’t do it because people in the United States won’t stand for it. Watch and see.
Yep. It’s an example of get woke go broke.
With regard to the linked story … Any time Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) get a comeuppance it fills me with joy.
Shouldn’t there be a discussion of the ridiculously small size of the human contribution to atmospheric CO2. By my figuring it would have to be increased 625 times its current level to be just one percent of the atmosphere. I doubt that the public is aware of this.
It would very much help to change the terminology of the discussion. This is not about “GHG emissions”, whatever those are, it is about the effects of significantly increasing the costs of the energy services (i.e. light, heat, air conditioning, mobility, etc.) that people need to support their standard of living and reducing the availability, security of supply and reliability of these services. It is about doing all of this to have zero marginal effect on the global environment. In other words, it is about rejecting a media and elite policy that offers all pain and no gain.
I think that if viewers of the OCO-2 satellite mapping correctly interpret what they are seeing then they will reach a conclusion that global CO2 increase is because of the increased vegetation (primarily broadleaf) and not human activity. This will mean that a bevy of “scientists”, politicians, media reporters and entertainers will have had the argument exactly backwards. The rising level of atmospheric CO2 is not the cause of global warming. Global warming is the cause of the rising level of atmospheric CO2.