By Joe Bastardi
We have had a week that has exposed the no-limits extremes of the climate campaign.
John Kerry, with his parting shot as Climate Czar, said that the world might feel better about Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian war if they lowered their climate footprint.
The depths of lunacy this reaches know no bounds. It is because of the actions of Kerry and his ilk in the administration Putin has the funds to fight the war in the first place.
In Germany, destroying an ancient forest to put up wind turbines is beyond any rational thought. First of all, you can wreck plenty of open spaces with the turbines. But the removal of 120k ancient trees, each taking away 50 lbs of CO2 for 6 million pounds a year, and the environmental cost of building these monstrosities should have every environmentalist up in arms. Do they realize the effect on the local climate? Forests are a great way to remove CO2 as I mentioned above, and are naturally cooler areas. So if you are afraid of CO2 (I am not, but understand you might be) this shows in no uncertain terms the depths of delusion these people are forcing on others. How this is even considered, is beyond me. And if you are an environmentalist how are you not up in arms at this? You have a forest that has survived wars and turmoil. Germany’s forests are supposedly dying because of climate change so they destroy more forests to prevent more climate change. How is this even considered or tolerated? This is just another matter that Dostoevsky was right about.
Then, there is this illustration from this Twitter handle.
True Science PEng, DFP, ADFS, MA, MBA.
The covering of fields with solar panels could actually ADD TO WARMING. The illustration means microclimates will indeed change. We see this all the time with cities. Not only is there an urban heat island with downstream implications. (For example, the Philadelphia UHI is a great place to start thunderstorms that then follow the 3 major highways, US 30, US 322, and the Atlantic City expressway ESE toward the shore. There are major differences in thunderstorm frequency at the NJ shore for instance north of Atlantic City vs south, more to the north enhanced by the effect noted above). But now imagine fields that were covered with cooling vegetation replaced with solar panels that can elevate temperatures to 70C. Imagine the change to the environment in those areas. The vegetation and animal life be dammed.
But this is because the people pushing this HAVE NO LOVE OF WEATHER OR CLIMATE. I have written about this several times. They simply use weather and climate to advance their mission. There is no rational thinking about this. It is getting so bad that the Dostoevsky quote above, not only is evident in the irrational policies we are seeing enacted in non-climate issues but is leading to some kind of disorder that is causing societal disruptions we are seeing with climate protesters that are blocking roads or trying to destroy priceless art. Circle back to the destruction of the ancient forest. How is that so different from throwing orange paint on a priceless piece of art as far as an irrational action based on a phony mission?
In the face of all this lunacy, these facts seem to be completely ignored, nicely compiled by man-made climate change skeptic, Graham Keagan:
Since 1900… – Life expectancy +130% – Literacy percentage up 4 fold – Population up 5 fold – GDP per capita up 7 fold – Poverty down 7 fold – Death from natural disasters down 50 fold (with 5x the number of people on the planet) Civilization is flourishing!
There is no rational reason for what is being forced down the throat of the planet. The destruction of an ancient forest should raise alarm bells. Kerry’s parting comments that would imply a carbon footprint reduction would somehow offset aggression that we are indirectly funding by phony climate war policies Kerry advocates should raise alarm bells. The effect of these actions on the environment, the destruction of large areas of nature by the establishment of these fields, and the cost of the materials should be obvious. This has nothing to do with climate or weather. It is being pushed by people who have no love of climate, weather, nature, or mankind in general.
Dostoevsky was (is) right. It’s time for rational people to stop this irrationality. I have never thought climate should be a big issue, but what is driving all this is. The motivation for all this is the reduction, if not destruction, of man’s upward mobility — and climate is the tool. This must be stopped peacefully at the ballot box. Because, in the end, this irrationality is the nail in the coffin of our freedom and is designed for top-down elitist control.
I agree. We are dealing with statists and elitists that want complete control. Goodbye freedom!
You have not made the connection between the government class and big business. They have a symbiotic relationship whereby the government has enshrined theft from the less well off to themselves and their big business supporters. All in the name of reducing CO2, which will not happen.
So the rational reason is for government class and big business to enrich themselves at the expense of the chumps who believe the scam and do not revolt at the sanctioned theft.
Big miners and energy producers know that NetZero is the greatest pot of gold for them ever created. There are no limits to the level of government sanctioned theft that NetZero embodies. Some of the theft is obvious by way of open subsidies and taxes but much of the theft is hidden by galloping inflation.
The world commit its entire resources to achieving NetZero and it would never be achieved. It takes more coal to make the NetZero hardware than that hardware could save in coal. It is a never ending burden on all of humanity.
The natural order for humanity since the first city states is for a group of pathologically greedy individuals to exploit the majority. Monarchy, democracy, socialism and capitalism all end up being euphemisms for kleptocracy and however well intentioned a system is at the outset, the governmint and civil service ultimately end up fulfilling their foundational role, which is the orderly concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a small group of mentally ill people who ultimately destroy the civilisations they parasitize. There are brief blossomings of fundamental human rights and human dignity such as that inititiated by the American Constitution but the relentess erosion of the free market and fundamental human rights always results in a parasitic load that is too heavy for a society to sustain.
Bill Gates and the WEF come to mind.
Yes. Bureaucrats measure their personal success by the size of their fiefdom: employees and budget. They have every incentive to grow and no incentives to shrink, other than from external forces such as bankruptcy.
A simple example: As an organization grows, its payroll department begins working overtime, and probably around 10 hours a week of overtime, they hire a new clerk who now has 30 hours free time every week. They find work for him, such as planning company outings, birthday parties, employee of the month, and so on. As the organization continues growing, overtime comes into the picture again, and rather than cut back on these superfluous activities, once again they hire another full time clerk, and once again find useless ways to make him work close to full time.
If the organization shrinks from market pressure, every payroll clerk scrambles to look as busy as possible. The useless activities get spread out, making it harder to fire just one or two.
Private businesses eventually bite the bullet and fire people because the alternative is bankruptcy. Free markets, competition, that’s what keeps businesses at least semi-efficient. Government, of course, has no such restrictions. Not only can they just raise taxes, they can add laws and regulations to make more work for themselves, and boy howdy do they!
Foundational economist Carl Menger explained the phenomenon with his theory of marginal utility, which applies to people just as it does to products. When a new community hires its first policeman he is a very valuable person performing an important service. Later on, as the community grows, as each additional policeman is added to the force, the importance of each one lessens. In the end, when there are many policemen, if one stays home for a couple of days, the community doesn’t even notice his absence. His marginal utility has gone plummeted.
‘Not only can they just raise taxes…’
Populations eventually resist overt taxation above some level. However, a government can increase it’s share of ‘loot’ by borrowing, which simply defers taxation for some period of time, provided that growth in the cost of debt service doesn’t exceed the growth rate of the economy. Unfortunately, by implementing a fiat monetary system that allows fractional reserve banking directed by a government-controlled central bank, a government is able to blow through the above limits on overt taxation by also covertly taxing the population via monetary inflation. This situation can rapidly become unstable, but it sums up where we are today.
They eventually reach the peak of the Laffer Curve and from then on tax income falls because it kills off wealth generation. In the bad days of 1970s Britain we had a top tax rate of 98%. So earn a pound and keep tuppence – great incentive that. Only today the excellent Liam Halligan was talking about how the Treasury take no account of the increase in revenue from increased activity that tax cuts can deliver.
If inflation keeps going up, at a rapid rate, the party in power usually gets replaced.
exactly – the destruction of large swathes of NE Scotland by wind farms, battery systems, hydrogen plants and of course miles of overhead power lines is a case in point. Driven by private (overseas owned) companies fulfilling a mandate driven by bad policy and a desire to maximise profits.
The Scottish Green party support this madness….
I recently got into an argument in a business forum with a writer recommending a renewables company as a good investment. I tried to be gentle and educational, but he wasn’t having any of that. So, by the time I was done with him, he had admitted that renewables could not compete with conventional under any circumstances, that they survived only because of subsidies, but claimed they were nervetheless a good investment because subsidies had so much momentum. He then started posting graphs of rising temps and CO2 and other things and said we couldn’t go on like this. I put the info he provided into context and he then complained that I was painting him as an alarmist, which he was not. Why then I asked, paste the graphs and say we can’t go on like this?
Despite having admitted that I was right on every point, his parting shot was that many of the issues I raised were “red herrings”. I summarized the entire thread into a single post for easy reading and then I cancelled my subscription to the service.
My point here is that for people under a certain age, even when they are forced to admit that their conclusions are wrong and unsupported by facts, they cannot let go of their belief system. They’ve been inculcated with that thought system since kindergarten. So facts that he admitted were true had to become “red herrings”.
This is a disease of the mind for which I know no cure.
Cognitive dissonance.
“they cannot let go of their belief system”
Substitute “religion” for “belief system” to understand why they cannot let go.
Climate dogma resonates with the need to make a chaotic world manageable, as does religion .. Threats of Armageddon, salvation through penance, securitized indulgences, “truth” that can only be understood through learned intermediaries who interpret and teach the holy texts, not directly from the holy texts themselves, in other words, a priesthood.
Joe Bastardi: “there is no rational reason…”
Not rational, emotional, and largely subconscious.
In BC we have destroyed our anadromou fisheries, we have populations of caribou, moose, mule deer, bighorn sheep, fishers, wolverine, etc that are all in serious decline. None of these are caused by global warming and yet the Provincial Government has only two real environmental initiatives. One is to tilt insanely at Carbon and the other is to preserve old growth. Neither of these initiatives has the slightest relevance to our real environmental issues. The global warmists are some of the least environmentally conscious people who have ever existed.
It’s time for rational people to stop this irrationality…
How? If you are banned from speaking?
Charlie Mackay pointed out that “When men go mad they go mad in herds” – we are now in the middle of a stampede.
A mature forest is, pretty much by definition, carbon neutral. New trees grow and capture carbon at the same rate that old trees die and release carbon.
A mature forest takes a long time to mature…
.. so let’s just chop it down and make a wasteland of avian death wheels.
Where did I advocate chopping down the forest?
What a really dumb statement.
It takes 50 years to grow a commercial forest.
It takes about a week to burn it for fuel. About a year to use it as lumber.
How can that possibly be “Carbon neutral”?
Try reading the first 4 words of my post. Did I talk about a commercial forest?
The article is principally about a forest being cut down for a wind farm.
I think everybody here understands how an unmolested forest functions, so what was the point of your post if it was simply stating the obvious and not contributing to the discussion?
There are more of them, than there are of us. We cannot stop them. The press, Hollywood and government encourages them. They choose based on looks, sound and credentials, not facts, knowledge and logic. They are vicious and vindictive. While I do not believe God interferes, Armageddon seems more and more likely, in the near future
No, there are more of us. Look at all the polls which show global warming at near the bottom of what the public cares about.
The difference is that “they” are the layabouts, the bums, the political class, the unproductive parasites who have nothing better to do.
I blame it on subsidized education drawing in people who have no use for college. They don’t need it for work, they don’t need it for personal education. Its only purpose is that diploma which shows they can waste 4 years of their lives following orders.
And because they haven’t got the smarts or the interest to get a real degree of the STEM or even business variety, they’d all drop out in the natural course of events. That’s the last thing the political class wants; and losing all that sweet sweet tuition is the last thing colleges want, so they dream up marginal fields taught by marginal researchers.
And THAT is why there are so many parasites and bums blocking roads and ruining art.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
The US Founding Fathers formed a Government under the Constitution and The Bill of Rights to make it very difficult for it to succumb to “mob rule”.
(Of course they’ve been greatly eroded over time.)
Put it on T-shirts, baseball caps, stickers everything.
I like it. Here is one I sort of created.
Nice!
or
In Ontario they have dumped a lot of money into battery plants and burble on, with the Trudeau government, about sourcing the inputs locally, and the glorious future we will all have, but the environmental legislation hatched by the Trudeau government makes it near impossible to develop those minerals.
There is the Ring of Fire in north western Ontario, a mineral rich area (chromite, nickel, copper, platinum group elements, gold, zinc, and other valuable minerals), but that is locked up by that Trudeau government’s legislation (no oil or other resources act) and made difficult to access by other UN based rules (DRIP) that require “consent” from all indigenous peoples.
Pulling at the same thing from different directions.
At least the current Provincial government claims to be all in w.r.t. nuclear power, but we will see how that goes and the “progressives” wail and moan about magical power not being accessed.
Where’s the net net? Solar panels are supposed to be a solution to “too much CO2 being spilled into the atmosphere”. How does the math work for these loons? You spill CO2 to cut down the ancient forest; you spill CO2 to process the cut down forest; you spill vast amounts of CO2 manufacturing the thousands and thousands of panels; you spill CO2 transporting and installing these panels; you spill CO2 upgrading the infrastructure with new and more powerlines to feed back into the grid; when the math is tallied up ZERO CO2 has been sequestered – if indeed this was their goal…btw global warming is a hoax
As a Boy Scout in the ’70s, my troop was volunteering to do brush removal, trail maintenance, and erosion mediation in the forest, which was hard manual labor.
Meanwhile, the officially recognized “environmentalists” were spending their spare time smoking weed and playing hackey-sack on the quad.
Tells you all you need to know.
“Where are the true environmentalists?”
Hiding with the “Save the Whales” crowd?
I looked for but couldn’t find the quote where someone said something along the lines of, “Even if if CAGW is wrong, we need to join in because it’s doing the right thing.”
A suggestion for WUWT, a list on the top bar of such quotes?
Very nice Joe.
You danced all around the real issue and said it in your own way. This is not a climate, weather or science problem. It is a government problem. Get the government out of the energy business and the problem goes away. It has come to the point where I think we need to get the government out of the climate and weather business also.
Good luck with the ballot box, we need to use the ballot box but not only the ballot box. Remember the Soviet Union and Cuba had/have ballot boxes.
There is indeed method to their madness. They generally oppose nuclear power which can reduce the emission of CO2 from electricity production. It’s in fact likely the only method of electricity production which can demonstrate a significant reducition.
Conversely they vigorously support the unreliables – wind and solar – which cannot have a significant impact on reducing CO2.
All of this is entirely logical. If implemented – prohibition of nuclear and building absurd amounts of the unreliables – it all ensures that they will remain in power, because their cause will never be resolved. All of this is about power; it has nothing to do with solving any sort of problem or improving the lot of humans or the environment.
And all of this fear that is hyped is essentially “evidence free”, just speculation based on those models. I think Willis has put it best:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/
I urge everyone to enlighten everyone with the above. Especially those “only listen to mainstream media” folks. The “sheeple”.
Not that I disagree wit most you say, but
“In Germany, destroying an ancient forest”
One needs to define “ancient”. Outside of Russia, the only remaining ancient forest in Europe is Bialowieza Forest shared by Poland and Belarus. Pretty much all other forests in Europe have been cut and regrown multiple times. Please note, that I am not arguing that this justifies cutting the forest in question.
I like both Dostoyevsky and the quote, but the quote is likely misattributed.