Why America Will Reject Environmental Extremism
It is likely that you have not heard half what I’m going to share with you.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Presumptive Presidential nominee Joe Biden released what he’s calling his “Clean Power Plan.” This plan is drastically more aggressive than anything he previously agreed to, including $2 Trillion in new taxes — as proposed, raising the corporate tax rate and through new taxes — to create 100% Carbon-Free Electricity by 2035 (electricity makes up one-third of energy demand in the United States).
Fear + Urgency Leads to Horrible Decisions and Bad Policy
We are told Climate Change is going to ruin our lives and kill billions of people, if not our entire global population. It’s causing one in five British children to unnecessarily have nightmares (Reuters), it is said to be causing an increase in suicide rates (Stanford), and this kind of alarmism has been published for decades.
The notion that we are facing an EXISTENTIAL THREAT (language used in Mr. Biden’s stance on climate as well as countless others) is causing humanity to act like the do-dos of Ice Age. In response to such a dire outlook, one woman asked us to eat our babies to combat climate change. While likely a plant and disturbingly amusing, it is not too dissimilar from a Swedish scientist who seriously advocates the world to eat dead people as a solution to climate change. The idea that climate change is going to kill us, a story which every news media outlet seems to push, is causing people to dramatically over-react if they are to save this earth.
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly an ocean. ”
The reality is that not even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests we should be alarmist, and these “existential threats” do not scientifically exist. The Economist captured it well in their climate issue,
“It is important to understand all the things that climate change is not. It is not the end of the world. Humankind is not poised teetering on the edge of extinction. The planet itself is not in peril.”
Unfortunately, our “leaders” are more interested in fear coupled with urgency (a perilous combination highlighted by Hans Rosling in Factfulness).
““We need to create fear!” that’s what Al Gore said to me at the start of our first conversation [2009] about how to teach climate change… but I couldn’t agree to what he had asked. I don’t like fear. Fear of war plus the panic of urgency made me [incorrectly] see a Russian pilot and blood on the floor. Fear of pandemic plus the panic of urgency made me close the road and cause the drownings of all those mothers, children, and fishermen [in Africa]. Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that…
Al Gore continued to press his case for fearful animated bubbles beyond the expert forecasts, over several more conversations, until finally, I closed the discussion down.”
I have developed a healthy respect for Mr. Rosling, a Swedish-born man of humble origins who ended up advising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, and more. I genuinely wish I would have read his works before he passed away in 2018 so I could thank him for changing my perspective on the world for the better.
As an aside, and in honor of Mr. Rosling, the world is the best it’s ever been for the majority of the global population. Did you realize that legal slavery, deaths related to war, plane crashes, child labor, hunger, nuclear arms (peaked in 1980 and declined since), deaths from natural disasters, ozone depletion, smallpox, and other bad things have significantly decreased over the last one hundred years? Or that protected nature, women’s right to vote, new music, science, harvests, literacy, democracy, child cancer survival, girls in school, electrification, mobile phones, access to water, immunization, and the internet have all exploded as well?
The world has changed dramatically since I was born in 1985, and Mr. Rosling created a test to show how outdated our information manuals have become. The vast majority of people are unable to score better than a chimpanzee on Mr. Roslings Gapminder Test. Only 8 percent of people who take Mr. Rosling’s test know that a 30-year-old woman has spent, on average, only one year less in school than a 30-year-old man, for example. Can you score better than a chimpanzee on his test of global knowledge? More likely than not, you won’t be able to answer more than four correctly.
If you dare, you can take the Gapminder Test.
My Aha! Moment
I had an Aha!-moment when I realized the leaders of the climate change movement were using fear, plus the sense of urgency, to spread their climate change narrative. These leaders were unknowingly backing themselves into a corner!
Imagine if you say the world is going to end and provide 350 parts per million as the point of no return (the basis of the value 350 in Bill McKibben’s 350.org — a level we’ve already surpassed). The solution to the problem has to become extreme in response in order to prevent the end of the world from happening. Therefore, any realistic or non-extreme solution to the problem has to be thrown out on its face, or your exaggerations risk being exposed.
“Exaggeration, once discovered, makes people tune out altogether… Exaggerating the role of climate change in wars and conflicts, or poverty, or migration, means that the other major causes of global problems are ignored, hampering our ability to take action against them.”
I feel this is where many green “leaders” find themselves — they are wholly unable to accept any realistic solutions (like Natural Gas) because they risk being exposed. Not all of these people are bad people. Many of them are good people who care about their families, their environment, and making the world a better place for their grandchildren. Some though, are actually frauds, like Al Gore, who purposefully mislead people.
For the sake of climate change, there are too many people crying wolf. Please stop exaggerating, or we risk people tuning out altogether.
The Grand Energy Transition
The Grand Energy Transition (GET) - Robert A. Hefner III
Us vs. them. It’s a mentality that seems to be gripping our nation today. Climate Alarmism Has Caused Otherwise Intelligent people to think in terms of “fossil fuels” vs. “Renewables.” It’s an age-old way to get people to come to arms, either find a common enemy (fossil fuels) or find a cause that’s so noble people will rally behind it.
My grandfather published a book not long ago (2008) called the Grand Energy Transition, including an elegant chart categorizing fuels a different way — as Solids, Liquids, and Gasses.
From the advent of time until the late-19th century, global civilizations relied upon a carbohydrate economy (solids). Initially, this was the consumption of food and people doing the work; later, with the plow and other tools, animals like the horse and the ox were added to improve work output in the fields. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that the world changed dramatically for the better, enabled notably by Coal (a solid). There is a good argument that nuclear should be heavily considered today as well.
Liquids are hydroelectric dams and petroleum oil. Hydroelectric dams are incredible sources of energy. Unfortunately, they are largely already fully utilized around the globe (see the Switch Energy Alliance, Dr. Scott Tinker, the University of Texas at Austin). Petroleum oil is the other fuel, which ushered in an era of unparalleled scientific gains from the use of plastics and many other refined petroleum products (that I doubt you’re willing to give up). Watch the video Energy Power Life video; how many of the things in this woman’s morning routine are you willing to go without? It is frankly heroic what petroleum oil has done for the world’s quality of life.
Gasses are the future, however. Similar to the story of the Royal Navy switching from a coal-fired fleet to an oil-fired fleet (story below), we will switch to natural gas because it is a better, cleaner fuel that provides more power for less. Wind (I come from a state leading the nation in wind generation as a percentage of use) and solar will be used for the markets where they work. The future of energy gasses though is likely hydrogen.
We should categorize our fuels as Solids, Liquids, and Gasses, shedding the “us vs. them” mentality causing gridlock across our nation to address the important topic of climate change.
The Incredible Foresight of Winston Churchill
When World War I began, the British naval fleet was still coal-powered. Meanwhile, the American fleet had already converted to an oil-fired fleet. Just as coal provided numerous advantages over a wood-burning steam engine (train), so too would oil provide dramatic advantages over coal:
oil is twice as energy-dense as coal, providing speed advantages,
oil, due to its superior energy-density, requires less physical space for storage and transportation,
oil-burning ships created less smoke, making them less visible to the enemy,
oil required less manpower, and oil-fired ships could remain at sea for longer,
oil allowed submarines to run completely silent for the first time in history
“When Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911 he was already deeply concerned about German militarism,” and the British Naval Fleet was powered by coal-fired boilers. The ships were not able to reach 25 knots.
The British decision to switch from a coal-fired fleet to an oil-fired fleet posed a significant risk to their sovereignty, however. While the British had abundant supplies of coal, they are largely devoid of oil. A decision to convert to oil would mean they would be heavily reliant upon foreign powers for their own national security. They chose to convert to oil, nonetheless, tipping the balance of power in favor of the Allies. Their ships ran faster, quieter, safer, cleaner, and longer.
The Royal Navy’s switch from coal to oil was due to the fact oil is a superior fuel in every way.
The Age of Energy Gasses
Today we are pursuing the age of energy gasses — natural gas, wind, and solar with the future likely being a hydrogen economy.
Are renewable microgrids cheaper than diesel | Hydrogen | Enapter
Climate change can be, and should be, a non-partisan issue (even though the media you consume will try and convince you otherwise). They will try and tell you many things that are untrue or half-truths, at best. The fact is the “liberals” are largely in agreement with the “conservatives” on the issue of energy and climate. For example:
Then-President Barack Obama condemned politicians’ “slogans and gimmicks” on energy policy. Instead, he advocated for ramping up the use of… natural gas (as he did in more than one of his State of the Union addresses)
President Obama’s former Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, continues to advocate for Natural Gas as the main solution to climate change (WSJ).
Bill Gates’ favorite author, Vaclav Smil, understands the importance of Natural Gas as the best current solution to climate change (I invite you to read any of these more than 37 published books).
Environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC, advocates for nuclear and natural gas as solutions to climate change (read his new book Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts us All)
California Governor Jerry Brown, a celebrated environmentalist, refused to ban fracking because the science simply does not support such a ban.
Famed filmmaker Michael Moore released his documentary Planet of the Humans, exposing many of the myths about “renewables” after he realized they were not the solution.
The reality is no civilization in the history of the world has ever adopted a less energy-dense fuel and it’s highly unlikely we will buck millennia of precedent. Natural gas is a far superior fuel to coal. It is easier to transport, cleaner, more energy-dense, and, unlike Britain during the 20th century, its in absolute abundance within our own borders.
In conclusion
Climate change is not what you’ve been led to believe it is, and neither are the solutions. I trust we can all agree extremism doesn’t seem to work. Americans have routinely, and rightly, rejected extremist views like that of anti-Semites, Muslim extremism, police brutality, the Ku Klux Klan, and many more. America will soon ultimately reject environmental extremism as well.