By Robert Bradley Jr.
“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher.’ Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ – people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.” – Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Climate messaging is a mess as the Progressive Left tries to square the energy circle with affordability. Traditional messages have flunked. Complained one activist:
Maybe the problem isn’t climate denial. Maybe it’s climate messaging. We’ve been attempting to scare or shame people into caring, and it’s not effective. Is it time to completely rethink how we talk about climate and sustainability? We’ve spent years trying to influence people through fear, data, and moral urgency. The results? Mixed.
The latest despair comes from Bill McKibben in his Earth Day post, Let’s TALK Climate. “The so-called ‘climate hushing’ among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data,” he complained. McKibben then quotes from Claire Barber’s essay, which summarized a report by Searchlight Institute (a Democratic think tank), “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”
“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.
McKibben then provides some context:
The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require.
The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election…..
Wimp-out. Climate and energy were an issue to Republicans, independents, and libertarians, along with the overreach of the Democrat Party elsewhere. The IRA, notably, was an attempt to create too-big-to-fail, rent-seeking wind, solar, battery, and EV businesses. That horrendous bill threw deficit dollars at the worst energies, pure misdirection and waste that is now being undone by a new administration.
Back to McKibben:
In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.
Good news, right? The hyperbole and strongarming for bad over good, exaggeration over realism, encouraged at the federal level by a new Administration, was removed. Amway-eyed McKibben can see only red instead of green (as in less wind/solar/battery blight/sprawl).
Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as “controversial” as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.
McKibben quotes from the “media watchdogs” FAIR:
Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024. This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025….
McKibben fools himself, something that Richard Feynman warned against decades ago.
What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate [wrong]. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been [wrong].
Polls? Ask the question in terms of priorities or in terms of monetary sacrifice. Sure, it is easy to want a freebie to make X or Y better. But consider the reality that climate change and the environment are way back of, yes, bread-and-butter issues.
“Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day,” McKibben continues, “as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.” But that is largely from exaggeration from a political takeover of natural/social science around the issue. The neo-Malthusian consensus has been wrong since at least the 1960s on a variety of related issues. Bottom line: people are not the problem, they are the solution. Julian Simon lives in death. Paul Ehrlich is intellectually dead in death.
McKibben advises what the Republicans would like to see happen.
The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.
I doubt it. The Green New Deal Scam is exposed. “Climate” is code for energy inferiority, don’t eat meat, and don’t be temperature-comfortable indoors. Self-sacrifice, in other words, is a nonstarter from the U.S. to France. McKibben’s alarmism is just too tired and old. [1] Time’s up: Get real or get out.
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[1] McKibben ends on his regular alarmist note:
So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño [a natural phenomenon?] starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score….
… with a killer fallacy and magical thinking on stilts:
I’d couple [the pitch] with a full-on assault about affordability…. a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!
It’s easy for people to say they agree that climate change is a problem, but it’s a lot harder to get them to agree to take any action on the matter. International surveys have shown that even in countries where some people have indicated some willingness to pay higher taxes and prices to help combat the issue, those amounts are minuscule compared to what’s supposedly necessary. In addition, whether these people are willing to make big lifestyle changes like buying EVs and heat pumps, renouncing red meat and air travel, utilizing rapid transit more often, etc. is just as unlikely. And the main reason for this unwillingness is that people may concede climate change is a problem, except at worst it’s only a minor one that human creativity and resourcefulness can overcome and is being done already.
Sorry.. but it is the “Climate Change Agenda” that is the real threat to society and prosperity.
None of the things you mention will ever have the slightest effect on “the climate”.
>> It’s easy for people to say they agree that climate change is a problem
People can say whatever, but what would be the scientific base for that claim? Frequent readers on here might know my opinion about that by now.. it’s about global climate models supposedly forming that base, but shown to be wrong by each new cmip generation. There can’t be any question that the better resolution as well as the improvement in cloud-aerosol physics of the latest CMIP6 generation changed the global climate modeling outputs significantly.
From there it is a really small step to realize that this means conclusively that the older results and statements are no longer valid and using them without reevaluation is actually fraud.
So, no, I don’t see at all how you got to that conclusion, I do see a four decade long list of global climate models based claims, which were shown to be incomplete or wrong.
>> a quick move to clean energy drives down prices.
That is a bold claim and does not seem to reflect reality!
At the very least changing the energy industry on a country wide scale is anything but fast (in particular in democratic countries).
The MSM is still telling us (maybe not as often) that climate change is driving temperatures higher and causing extreme weather events. People assume it just isn’t happening to a noticeable degree where they live – but it will. They don’t see data – they see news headlines. The news doesn’t cover Mr. Watts’ studies of UHI, or poorly sited and instrumented stations, and damn little about RCP8.5 being discredited.
Some may even believe in some parts of the ocean the water is boiling. They’d have to be pretty stupid, but too many college grads can neither identify North America nor the Pacific Ocean on a globe.
The news doesn’t cover the fact that temperatures have cooled by 0.5C since 2024, either.
Going by the news and other Climate Alarmists, you would think the temperatures are getting hotter and hotter, day after day. They are not.
Yep, we are boiling the oceans!
Based on a temperature reading in a stream three inches deep near the mouth of cooling water outlet from a nuclear power plant. Must be climate change – and applicable to the whole ocean!
😄😆😅🤣😂
And even that was only just over 100 degrees….. Fahrenheit !!
And many “college” types signed petitions to ban dihydrogen monoxide. 😆😅🤣😂
The city council of Lake Forest, California were within hours of bringing it to a vote before someone alerted them to what DHMO was.
To be honest, it has killed a lot of people.
> People assume it just isn’t happening to a noticeable degree where they live – but it will.
I have the strong feeling that I already answered this..
There is no scientific base for your claim as global climate model results are basically a decades long list of similar claims, but were shown to be incomplete or wrong by their successors.
Mainstream media (and your average climate alarmists) needs to go back and correct these claims based on current knowledge, before they can have any meaning.
Any position based on an incomplete model is questionable.
But reversing loses ad click revenues, so do you really think this will happen or, rather, that some new crisis will illuminate the headlines.
From a certain point of view, trying to eliminate atomic weapons in Iran has done more to kill the climate crisis headlines than anyone could have anticipated.
Trumps (often obnoxious) rhetoric has done more to destabilize mass media headlines than would have been conceivable 1 year ago.
Sorry – my claim is that they are assuming it will. I agree with everything you say although I don’t think any complex model is complete.
I wonder if an AI can create a better model of our climate?
AI can create nothing.
Come on! AI can create bills, heat and spam. And lots of other things.
“Any position based on an incomplete model is questionable.”
More like: DENIABLE. 🙂
The claim of “renewables” being “cheap(er)” is a gigantic LIE grounded in leaving much of their actual cost out of the “calculation” thereof.
Everywhere they have added any significant amount of “renewables” into an electric grid, they have driven electricity prices UP AND UP AND UP. Only an idiot (or Bill McKibben, but I repeat myself) believes wind and solar will bring the cost of electricity down.
Not only do windmills and solar increase the costs of electricity, they also make the electric grids vulnerable to blackouts.
Before windmills and solar were added to the electric grids, there were no blackout warnings being issued.
Today, with the addition of windmills and solar to the grid, we get blackout warnings every winter and summer.
Initially, I did not want to get into this, as the timeline in itself is a sufficient to proof McKribben wrong.
But I was wondering if Koonin was debating McKribben on his tour .. Apparently, he did not, but Dessler made the “renewables are cheaper”-argument and here is Andy May’s takeaway from their debate:
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2022/08/18/overview-of-the-koonin-dessler-debate/?amp=1
“”‘He [Dessler] also provides evidence that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electricity, later Koonin counters that those statistics do not include the cost of backup or electrical grid upgrades for those times when the wind isn’t blowing at night or on cloudy days.””
Which seems a consensus!?
Isolated, you can sometimes produce electricity cheaply using renewables, but running a country with it will cost
(Personally, I think an energy mix is often most efficient)
Out in the cow pasture is a water tank for the cattle. 50 years ago a windmill pumped the water “for free”. in the eighties, the already 40-year-old gearbox broke…a grand to replace…and it was cheaper to bring in utility power under the REA (at the time but no longer). For years and years it was $16 a month, and included a free yard light for the cows to drink by. In the oughties, the power companies privatized, distribution got sold to Warren Buffett indirectly, retail sold to non-generating companies to provide “lower overhead costs”…and bills went up to $120 per month, half of which are “rider fees” to pay for bill prep and other wordsmithed overhead charges. So…a solar panel now supplies the electricity to a little pump from the local farm co-op for $1800….
So in some niche applications, Dessler is right…maybe he has a few cows in the middle of nowhere…although both the solar PV and Aermotor style windmills are in the same several $K cost range these days. If you have shallow water a bubbler type pump on a Koenders mill can be had for a couple of $K.
Urban dwellers with utility power don’t know how good they’ve got it….
McKibben, a “professor” at Middlebury College in Vermont is the Ed Miliband of Vermont
Middlebury College Overstates CO2 of Its Tree Burning Plant by 2 times and Sequestering CO2 by its Forests by 10 times
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/middlebury-college-overstates-co2-of-its-tree-burning-plant-and
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Middlebury College in Vermont, has an Environmental Studies Department.
The Department receives federal and state government grants and alumni bequests to perform environment-related studies
The Department held a Senior Student Seminar (ES 401) during the Winter of 2010 regarding:
1) the CO2 emissions of the Campus tree burning plant, and
2) the sequestering of CO2 by the forest owned by the College.
1) According to the Campus wood burning plant website, the best estimate of wood chip delivery is 20,000 tons of green wood chips per year.
Incorrect CO2 Calculation
The seminar report states: “Thus, a more realistic estimate of carbon emissions is: 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content x 44/12 x 1 = 36,667 tons of carbon”. See URL, pages 38 and 39.
This calculation is incorrect, because it did not account for the carbon content of dry wood
BTW, the word “carbon” should read “CO2”
http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/255078/original/Winter_2010carbon_sequestration.pdf
Correct CO2 Calculation
The wood chips contain 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content = 10,000 US ton of dry wood.
The dry wood contains 10,000 US ton of dry wood x 0.487 lb carbon/lb dry wood = 4,870 US ton of carbon.
The CO2 created by combustion is 44/12 x 4,870 = 17,857 US ton of CO2.
The report overstated the CO2 emissions by 36,667/17,856 = 2.05 times
2) Incorrect Calculation of CO2 Sequestered by the Forest
The report states: “Middlebury College-owned forests, 1295 ha (3200 acre), will sequester about 9,905 US ton of carbon/y, or 9905/3200 = 3.095 US ton of carbon/acre, or 44/12 x 3.095 = 11.35 US ton of CO2/acre. See URL, page 39, table 7
For reference: Vermont forestland, 4,511,000 acres, sequestered about 4,390,000 metric. ton of CO2, or 0.973 metric ton of CO2/acre, or 1.073 US ton of CO2/acre, per US Forest Service.
https://fpr.vermont.gov/sites/fpr/files/Forest_and_Forestry/The_Forest_Ecosystem/Library/Forest%20Carbon%20Inventory%20_Mar%202017_final.pdf
The report overstated the sequestered CO2 by 11.35/1.073 = 10.6 times
I sent McKibben a copy of my numbers
He told me he would forward it to the proper persons
Those are the type of enviros who fear-monger us, are taxing us, are mandating us, and are telling us to spend our hard-earned money on super-expensive, impoverishing Net-zero to reduce CO2 by 2050.
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CO2 is a life gas, if below 200 ppm most plants barely grow.
At 200 CO2 ppm, there would be no greening of the earth, and no fauna, and no 8 billion people.
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We need about 1000 CO2 ppm for optimum plant growth, as proven in laboratories and commercial greenhouses.
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These McKibben-perverted/brainwashed enviros are incompetent and should be reduced to nothing
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Middlebury state and federal government grants are being wasted and should be cancelled
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Alumni donations should not be squandered on BS “studies”.
Visual Ugliness of wind and Solar: Down-trodden, screwed-over Mainers have to endure the visual ugliness and noise of hundreds of windmills, that are often idle, because of too little wind year-round, and many thousands of acres of solar panels, that are often covered with snow and ice in winter; there is no solar at night. Wind and solar are totally unreliable.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/wind-power-is-not-the-harmless-energy-source-liberals-said-it-was
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Mini-brain Ed Miliband and his band of economic illiterati are on their way out, as are the highly unpopular Starmer, Macron and Merz, aka, the Three Blind Mice.
The cost of electricity from an offshore wind system on the US East Coast is about 15 c/kWh.
New York State utilities are forced to buy at 15.5 c/kWh. That cost would be 31 c/kWh, but the equivalent of 50% US and State tax credits and other project-enabling subsidies are provided to the risk-free, lucrative tax shelters of European $developers.
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Hidden Costs: Filling-in capacity, balancing capacity, counteracting capacity, grid extension/reinforcement, etc., about 11 c/kWh; power-plant to landfill basis.
Europe, which lacks fossil fuels, has impoverished itself and made itself uncompetitive by “going wind and solar”
The self-serving elites of Europe, who pushed for wind, solar, batteries, etc., had no idea about all those hidden costs,
When these costs were pointed out to them by very experienced energy systems analysts in 2000, these elites, using their Media foghorn, denied, obfuscated and vilified, already for at least 25 years. It will take years and many $billions to unravel that mess.
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Europe had about 64.2 million unvetted, uneducated, inexperienced, foreign-born, walk-ins/fly-ins/float-ins, from mostly Islamic Third World countries at end 2025 (not counting their many children and many grandchildren born in Europe).
A large percentage of those folks are sucking from multiple government programs. This accelerated Europe’s impoverishment.
Since 1945, Europe screwed the US out of $trillions for defense. Europe will finally be spending 3 to 5% of GDP on its own defense, instead of 1 to 2%. This will further accelerate Europe’s impoverishment.
The native folks of Europe are so screwed.
But, but, but, the wind and the sun are free fuels.
So is petroleum, natural gas, coal, uranium, etc., while still in the ground.
No one pays a fee to Gaia for permission to extract those.
As all of us know, the total cost of ownership ends with delivering the energy to the consumer. All of the intermediate costs must be accounted for before any claims of parity or better can be validated.
And the main reason for this unwillingness is that people may concede climate change is a problem, except at worst it’s only a minor one that human creativity and resourcefulness can overcome and is being done already.
I think not, I think the main reason is that the advocates never explain how what they propose to have a country do will make any difference to the climate. The reason that they do not do this is because it will make none. So people object to doing things which are expensive, inconvenient and useless.
Imagine you are Miliband. You claim the UK has to go to Net Zero in 2030 or whenever because climate. People point out that the UK does under 1% of global emissions, so the action will have no effect. This gets generally understood and wherever you speak someone raises this.
What do you say? You stop talking climate, and you find some other reason why Net Zero.
Harris’s “message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump”
I only remember one of those two things.
So far as the IRA, yes I remember the candidate and the debate questioners avoided talking about it.
Why would they want to discuss The Inflation Enhancement Act what with all the fascist climate activism and naked fraud built into it?
Does anyone really take anything that Homer McGibbon says as being remotely linked to reality?
If they do, they shouldn’t.
He is in his own little bubble, like most Climate Alarmists.
Tom, shouldn’t that be:
He is in his own little HIGHLY PROFITABLE bubble, like most Climate Alarmists
The Inflation Reduction Act was an Orwellian name for The Green New Deal Lite.
Yes, the IRA caused a lot of inflation in addition to wasting all that money on windmills and solar, which drives up the cost of electricity, adding even more inflation to American’s budgets.
aka “Inflation INDUCTION Act”
Like a lot of bills & referendums the titles are the reverse of what they’ll actually do.
People too often forget that the New Deal (Roosevelt, 1933-1939) was intended to restart the US economy to lift the country out of the (government caused) Great Depression. While there are some notable public works that shine even today, the ultimate goal failed and was terminated due to massive public debt.
Biden was one of the key architects of pulling out of Viet Nam. He was the key architect of pulling out of Afghanistan. Too many similarities to ignore.
So now comes the New Green Deal, renamed to IRA.
Those that ignore the lessons (aka mistakes) of history, or rewrite history, are doomed to repeat.
There are so many others but the point is made. Repeating what did not work with the hopes that “this time will be different” falls under the definition of insanity (repeating something over and over again and expecting different results…).
I think McKibben was bitten by a tick that made him allergic to sane thought.
There is an epidemic of that going around.
By all measures, the environment in the west has improved, d5ramatically
Yet thanks to the endless lies of those who make their living hyping environmental lies, most people don’t know that.
It has been reported that the three hours of “free electricity” in Australia is because of the excess of a rooftop solar & battery program such that the grid-supplied electricity is not wanted. After tremendous investment in grid-solar the homeowner program sabotaged the grid. Thus “solarized Australia” is a failure and not something for an ad to congresspeople.
OZ folks can help me out here. What’s up?
As I understand it the government mandated ‘Solar Sharer’ policy applies only to some states and was foisted on retailers without consultation.
It appears to be an attempt to change behavior by encouraging consumers to use more electricity around midday when demand is lowest.
Retailers are expected to simply recover costs by charging a bit more at other times of the day.
In other words ‘a big nothingbuger’.
The even funnier part is for the few households who can exploit the free energy they win but as with everything some pays. The free energy hours does not depend on solar excess being available so retailers at times will have to fire up backup generation on cloudy days etc .. so actually it will drive up fossil fuel use on the network 🙂
As Chris said all that will happen is the retailers will move the charge up on other parts to cover there costs.
JH:
[Not from Oz but its plain to see]:
Electricity costs have gone up, and the grid is more fragile.
Any national grid that depends upon wind/solar/batteries will also be beholden to China & the CCP – they own those markets (and Australia has already found out that China is not afraid to use their leverage for political purposes).
What McKibben leaves out, of course, is the cost of electricity outside of the duck curve of rooftop solar produced when demand is lowest.
Ask the Aussies about how their electric rates have changed over the last few decades.
So, lying about climate is out. Lying about energy is in. Got it.
I think they are probably going to continue lying about both. It’s all they can do.
Bill McKibben is still around, and flapping his lips???
I thought he peacefully crawled away 5-10 years ago?
Oh well, I guess he’s still trying to be relevant in today’s world.
The real difficulty, and the real reason why its failing, is that the activists are unable to say how the measures they propose will have any effect on the problem they allege.
This is because they will not have any effect. And this in turn is because the believer nations are doing too little emissions for it to make any difference either way if they stop or carry on. As this becomes obvious to everyone, the activists stop talking about climate and start finding other reasons to promote wind and solar.
You can see this in the UK, where Miliband has stopped talking about climate change as a justification for Net Zero and the move to wind and solar, and switched to talking about cost reduction and energy independence. Equally idiotic, but different. Why the Greens have also stopped majoring on climate and turned to other left fantasies. It was getting obvious to everyone that whatever the UK does with its emissions, it will have no effect on the climate, since they are only 1-2% of the global total.
You find this in other areas of life where unscientific theories produce waves of cult like behavior, notably diet theories. One example is Food Combining. The theory started out as asserting that the enzymes for digesting protein and carbs are different and incompatible, so we should only eat one or the other at any given meal. It then turns out this account of the enzymes is just wrong, so the dietary practices are then promoted on the basis they will lead to a balanced diet. Similarly with the crazed nonsense about the alkaline diet. People desperately want to believe something and do something and so will find some new reason if it turns out the original one is invalid.
The answer is wind and solar. Now, what was the question?
The real difficulty, and the real reason why its failing, is that people have figured out, after nearly 40 years of “the sky is falling” blather about “climate change,” that:
And after a while, this erodes political support for the “climate” nonsense.
Greta shifted from climate to Hamas.
Maybe she is a bit more intelligent than my initial assessment concluded.
Not really. Her missions to bring supplies to Palestine provided very little help – the boats were too small and much space was taken up by the activists – but it made them feel good.
The point is, she gave up on Climate.
And in doing so might possibly maybe be showing a sliver of intelligence.
A group that abhors pork …..
calling itself ham ass
😉
They should try something completely new:
SHOW ACTUAL EVIDENCE THAT MAN’S CO2 IS CAUSING SERIOUS GLOBAL WARMING.
Part of that evidence package includes:
1–What caused the Egyptian warm period 5000 years ago, the Egyptian old kingdom warm period 4400 years ago, the Minoan Warm period 3000 years ago, the Roman warm period 2000 years ago, the Medieval warm period 1000 years ago. They were all warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels. Then 1000 years later, came our current warm period RIGHT ON SCHEDULE OF A 1000 year (approximate.) cycle..
2–What caused the current warm period, LIKE ALL OTHERS to start BEFORE CO2 started to rise
3–Explain why we have both a PERFECTLY normal climate and a “climate crisis”
4–Explain why solar cycles are a better fit to climate than CO2
5–Why 1-2 C warming since the COOLEST TIME in 8000 years is a “crisis”
And a few other things like why climate advocates constantly lie to us and far too many are getting rich on their advocacy.
Europe in Conflict for about 500 years While Building its Empires
https://willempost.substack.com/p/europes-decline-from-a-lofty-perch?r=1n3sit&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
The Little Ice Age (1300 – 1850): That period was significantly colder than the Cold Dark Ages. This led to less crops, more famines, more diseases, and social-economic instability, and less wealth that could be extracted by the elites, especially after the Black Death, which was a devastating plague that struck Europe between 1346 and 1353, killing an estimated 30% to 60% of the population (roughly 25–50 million people). The Black Death had several less-severe outbreaks later in the 1300s. The prosperity of the Warm Middle Agescould no longer be maintained. The elites had to find other sources of revenues to fight wars and maintain lifestyles.
Luckily, in southern Europe, ocean-crossing ships had been developed by Portugal and Spain in the 1300s, which enabled exploration and colonization of distant lands. Ships of Portugal and Spain sailed down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, to India and Indonesia and back again to trade in luxury goods and eventually establish permanent colonies. The spices, tea, silk, porcelain, etc., were sold at huge mark-ups to upper class European people.
The wealth extracted from these colonies mostly accrued to 1) the top 0.5%, 2) the Roman Catholic Church, and 3) business entities provided upscale goods and services, including weaponry for fighting. Almost all other people continued living in small towns and villages and were tied to and worked on the large estates of nobles.
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First Columbus Voyage August 3, 1492: Almost 200 years into the LIA, the eastward trade was long, risky, expensive and often not sufficiently profitable. The elites, lacking sufficient domestic income because of bad times, needed additional income from faraway lands. Accordingly, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain financed and commissioned Columbus to make a westward voyage to India and Indonesia, promising him rewards if successful.
Columbus departed Spain with three ships—the Santa Maria, Pinta, and Niña—aiming to find a westward sea route to India and Indonesia. He spent about 33 days at sea, departing from the Canary Islands on September 6, 1492. He reached San Salvador, an island in the Bahamas, on October 12, 1492. He firmly believed until his death that he had reached the East Indies, leading to the misnaming of the indigenous population as “Indians”. Columbus had underestimated the Earth’s circumference and was unaware of the existence of the Americas.
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First Circumnavigation of the Earth: The first circumnavigation of the Earth (1519–1522) was a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan to find a westward route to the Spice Islands. While Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521, the ship Victoria, commanded by Juan Sebastián Elcano, completed the voyage. Five ships departed from Spain, only one, Victoria, came back. Only 18 of the original 270 men survived.
https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/magellan-circumnavigation-earth
Good.
Now try this:
Until they define the optimum climate in metrics that are measurable and testable by anyone, we cannot know if we have departed from a climate optimum or moving towards one.
They never established a definition for the climate optimum.
Is 1850 really the best?
Answer is obvious.
I don’t like the illustration. It makes it look like Bill McKibben is capable of logical thought as opposed to the unhinged, deluded, eco-facist leftist activist he actually is.
In the mean time Hollywood hypocrites like Harrison Ford give speeches at colleges imploring students to ‘do what you have to to save the planet from climate change’. Who are these students going to listen to? Politicians or Harrison Ford? Even when politicians are on the ‘right side’ it doesn’t matter because they’ve been consistently on the ‘wrong side’ on so many issues for so long there’s 0 trust in them.
With that said, we have to keep fighting, pointing out that CO2 is the ‘gas of life’, that life on the planet was FAR more prolific when there was nearly 10 times the CO2 as today and the planet several degrees warming. We have 0 control over how the climate will change, wasting trillions of dollars on removing a beneficial trace gas is ludicrous and embarrassing.
I asked some people I know in Vic, NSW and QL, and none of them were particularly happy with the power rates there, which are at least twice the rate of places like Ontario, which relies upon nuclear and hydro for base load. The 3 hour ‘free’ window in some Aus states is apparently available to those who have signed up to TOU, many with their own solar panels, though they still had to pay the high TOU rates at ‘peak’ times and agree to ‘feed in’ their solar panel output. You can image the expletives that were associated with the discussions…
More good news. All I can say is I’m glad McKibben isn’t on our side.
Climate hustler, Sheldon. Not husher. And a climate hustler is sort of the opposite of what you’re describing. There are lots of those. Take Al Gore for example who makes his living off the climate hustle. Cue “The Hustle” by Van McCoy and picture Al shimmying about the ballroom of his mansion emitting rapturous shouts (“do the hustle!”) as he rakes in tribute from his acolytes.
You aren’t the brightest bulb in Congress, Sheldon, so we don’t expect you to keep abreast, but no one has ever used the term “climate husher” because it’s a mythical creature of your own making. No one is hushing the bleating alarmists. They’re just decisively refuting their silly claims with observations and actual science and savagely mocking their blind devotion to a phantasm about which they know absolutely nothing.