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There Is No “Climate Emergency”.

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There is no “climate emergency”, according to a study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by independent scientist Dr Indur Goklany.

Goklany concludes:

While climate may have changed for the warmer:

• Most extreme weather phenomena have not become more extreme, more deadly, or more destructive

• Empirical evidence directly contradicts claims that increased carbon dioxide has reduced human wellbeing. In fact, human wellbeing has never been higher

• Whatever detrimental effects warming and higher carbon dioxide may have had on terrestrial species and ecosystems, they have been swamped by the contribution of fossil fuels to increased biological productivity. This has halted, and turned around, reductions in habitat loss

The report will make hugely depressing reading for all the prominent environmental activists — from the Pope and Doom Goblin Greta Thunberg to the Great Reset’s Klaus Schwab — who have been pushing the “climate emergency” narrative. It is an article of faith for the globalist elite and their useful idiots in the media, in politics, in business, and the entertainment that the world is on course for climate disaster which only radical and costly international action can prevent.

But Goklany’s report — Impacts of Climate Change: Perception & Reality — claims there is little if any evidence to support the scare narrative.

At the end, Goklany provides a table, setting out all the scaremongering claims made by environmental groups — and then comparing them with observed reality. Only one of the claims stands up, according to the study — weather has been getting slightly warmer:

More hot days and fewer cold days — Yes

Cyclones/hurricanes more intense or frequent — No

Tornadoes increase and become more intense — No

Floods more frequent and more intense — No

Droughts more frequent and intense — No

Area burned by wildfire increasing — No (area peaked in mid-19th century)

Cereal yields decreasing — No (they have tripled since 1961)

Food supplies per capita decreasing — No (increased 31 per cent since 1961)

Land area and beaches shrinking, coral islands submerged — No. (Marginal expansion)

None of the doom-mongering claims made about a decline in human welfare stands up, either, according to the study.

Access to cleaner water has increased; mortality from ‘Extreme Weather Events’ has declined by 99 per cent since the 1920s; fewer people are dying from heat; death rates from climate-sensitive diseases like malaria and diarrhoea have decreased (since 1900 malaria death rates have declined 96 per cent); hunger rates have declined; poverty has declined (GDP per capita has quadrupled since 1950 even as CO2 levels have sextupled); life expectancy has more than doubled since the start of industrialisation; health adjusted life expectancy has increased; global inequality has decreased in terms of incomes, life expectancies and access to modern-day amenities; the earth is green and more productive; habitat lost to agriculture has peaked due to fossil fuel dependent technologies.

It will be hard for green activists to dismiss Goklany as a “denier”. His credentials as a climate expert are impeccable. He was a member of the U.S. delegation that established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and helped develop its First Assessment Report. He subsequently served as a U.S. delegate to the IPCC, and as an IPCC reviewer.

Goklany says:

Almost everywhere you look, climate change is having only small, and often benign, impacts. The impact of extreme weather events ― hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts ― are, if anything, declining. Economic damages have declined as a fraction of global GDP. Death rates from such events have declined by 99% since the 1920s. Climate-related disease has collapsed. And more people die from cold than warm temperatures.

Even sea-level rise — predicted to be the most damaging impact of global warming — seems to be much less of a problem than thought, according to the study’s findings.

Goklany says:

A recent study showed that the Earth has actually gained more land in coastal areas in the last 30 years than it has lost through sea-level rise. We now know for sure that coral atolls aren’t disappearing and even Bangladesh is gaining more land through siltation than it is losing through rising seas.

In his report, Goklany destroys many of the green movement’s shibboleths, including the notion that fossil fuels are bad for the planet. Not only, he suggests, has their CO2 contributed to “global greening” — “contrary to prevailing wisdom, tree cover globally has increased by over 2 million km2 between 1982 and 2016, an increase of 7 percent” — but they provide the fertilizers and pesticides which simultaneously feed the planet and reduce the amount of land required for agriculture:

Thus, nitrogen fertilisers and carbon dioxide fertilisation have together increased global food production by 111 per cent. In other words, fossil fuels are responsible for more than half of global food production. Without them, food would be scarcer, and prices higher (assuming all else, including food demand, stays constant). To maintain the food supply, croplands would have to more than double, to at least 26 per cent of the world’s land area (ex-Antarctica). Adding in pastureland, the human footprint on the planet would increase to 51.2 per cent of the world. In other words, fossil fuels have saved 13.8 per cent of the non-frozen parts of the world from being converted to agriculture.

At the beginning, he quotes a number of climate doom-mongers, including the Pope. According to the Pope:

The effects of global inaction are startling…Around the world, we are seeing heat waves, droughts, forest fires, floods and other extreme meteorological events, rising sea levels, emergencies of diseases and further problems that are only premonition of things far worse, unless we act and act urgently.

Maybe it’s time the Pope looked at some actual evidence…

 

California’s Destruction Can Be Summed Up In The Hypocrisies And Paradoxes Of Its Bankrupt Elite.

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Why we chose this article: Victor Davis Hanson provides historically informed analysis of the parasitic and hypocritical progressive elite, and is particularly insightful about the negative impact of their behavior in his home state of California. His commentary tells us what to fear in the future for America, if we are unable to reverse the elitist entropy.

Fall is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.

Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky. Fall is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.

Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky.

A cynical interpretation of the eco-agenda was that doing nothing to clean up the mess was cheap for a broke state eager to spend billions on high-speed rail and the consequences of open borders. The even more cynical take would be that dead trees served as green napalm during fire season to discourage the unwanted hoi polloi from living in the hill and mountain cabins that in a more perfect world would properly belong, in Sheriff of Nottingham style, to the Sierra Club. And indeed, the unspoken aftermath of this latest round of conflagrations is that insurance rates will soar even higher and make it nearly impossible to live in rural hills and mountains.

Apparently, our ancestral, Neanderthal foresters once upon a time believed in the time-tried lore of removing dead brush, cutting down withered trees for needed lumber, and allowing grazing to clear foothills of dead grasses and low vegetation. But then again, the old-breed thinking has been seen as obsolete by today’s brilliant new progressive consultants, professors, and activists. They were too eager to implement a natural strategy of letting medicinal fires periodically burn forest fuel to remind us that millions of trees are not for living among, or logging or recreating amid, or for anything much human-orientated other than a week or so a year backpacking.

 

The COVID-19 Models Are Inaccurate. So Are The Climate Change Models.

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It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were driven by faulty models.

What then, are we supposed to make of the models that have been fueling the global warming hysteria?

The forecast used to predict 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 510,00 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”

OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.

Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates, and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 millon “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.

We can’t say for sure which model has it right. Will deaths be in the millions? Or will coronavirus be less lethal than the seasonal flu?

But we can say that at least one of the models is wrong.

So what does this tell us about the climate models that officials keep telling us are evidence that man is overheating his only planet?

The lesson is that we shouldn’t put our full trust in the global warming alarmists’ claims. But then independent thinkers have known for some time the climate models are far from perfect:

  • Six years ago, Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted that “most temperature records show that since 1998 the models and observed average global temperatures have parted ways. The temperatures in the models continue to rise, while the real climate has refused to warm up much during the last 15 years.
  • In 2017, Bailey reported that, according to a “fascinating new study” in Nature Geoscience, “climate computer model projections of future man-made warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide are running too hot.”
  • Last year, John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Hunstville, told the British Parliament “an early look at some of the latest generation of climate models reveals they are predicting even faster warming. This is simply not credible.”
  • Also last year, author Guy Sorman wrote in City Journal the models used by United Nations scientists cannot “explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age.”
  • Climatologist Judith Curry has also said the models “seem to be running too hot.”
  • Christy’s university colleague Roy Spencer, a former NASA climate scientist, says “global warming projections have a large element of faith programmed into them” because “we have no idea how much warming” is caused by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas the political left has chosen to vilify.
  • A little more than a year ago, climate researcher Patrick J. Michaels noted the authors of a paper published in Nature Climate Change “show that the aggregate models are making huge errors in three of the places on earth that are critical to our understanding of climate.”

Despite the healthy skepticism from scientists who have been studying the climate for decades and have held prominent academic positions, the Democrat-media powered narrative never sleeps. But that’s what we expect from those who are ever searching for a crisis to take advantage of.

 

The Real Reason Nobody Takes Environmental Activists Seriously.

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Environmental activists are weird. Filled with a deep-rooted desire to do good, to save the world from imminent destruction, and to preach the ecological gospel to anybody (un)willing to hear it, they wield a surprising amount of influence — in the media if not in the halls of power. They get a lot of cred and admiration for their efforts, but perhaps they shouldn’t.

Most people agree with their creed: humans greatly impact our environment, perhaps to the detriment of fundamental ecological systems, and we ought to reduce that. Few of us accept their unrelenting extremism and unwillingness to accept trade-offs. What bothers the opponents of environmental activism is not the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but the activists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity.

In the activists’ eyes, every action is classified as “good” or “bad” if it has easy-to-understand first-order environmental benefits or harms: recycling plastic is good, littering is bad; planting trees is good, one-use takeaway bags are bad; heating your house with “renewable energy” is good, burning gasoline is bad; etc.

The trouble begins when these individually good actions are coupled with bad ones. What if I drove my gasoline-gobbling car to the tree-planting site? What if recycled plastic, as in the U.S., ends up in the same landfill as the other trash, neutralizing my “good” efforts? What if I discard (or lose) my sustainable metal straws before I’ve used them enough times for the CO2 emissions to break even compared to single-use plastic?

The inability to see these chains of decisions is a qualifying criterion for becoming an environmental activist. For the rest of us, it is too much to stomach a sermon about the essential virtue of reducing one’s climate impact while knowing that the preacher, in other domains of their life, completely negates the minor climate benefit of whatever action they implore us to take. The hypocrisy is real.

Illustrative Anecdotes Abound

Mike Munger’s writing on recycling is a splendid example, concluding that for most commodities, recycling is a religious ritual, done for feel-good reasons rather than actual impact. Stories like these show the cognitive dissonance of do-gooders:

“I once watched a young woman in Vitacura, Chile, wait in line in her idling auto for more than 10 minutes so she could park and put two two-liter plastic bottles into a recycle bin. That’s not economics, that’s a religious ceremony. Without scale, most recycling harms the environment.”

If we need to reduce our climate impact to save the environment (it’s always unclear what the environment is, and what exactly we’re saving it from), it is the sum of our impacts that matters. If we do enough “bad” in some part of our lives, we shouldn’t applaud ourselves for doing some “good” elsewhere, especially if the impact of the bad completely dwarfs the impact of the good.

Even the celebrated wonderchild St. Greta falls prey to this. In pledging not to fly because of aviation’s outrageously large emissions (per-person emissions, mind you, not in aggregate, where aviation only accounts for 3 percent of global emissions), she famously took a high-tech wind-powered sailing boat across the Atlantic to speak before the UN. The only trouble was that she outsourced the flying emissions to the boat’s crew, several of whom flew back across the Atlantic after delivering St. Greta to the UN’s doorsteps, where she continued to lambast the world’s emitters of climate gases. The total emissions of Greta’s highly politicized non-carbon journey were, in other words, much higher than had she simply bought a standard plane ticket.

International travel, too, is cherished by the very people whose ideals should preclude them from visiting places much further away than their neighboring villages. In a wholly representative picture of the righteous environmentalist traveler, I recently met a vegan girl who carried her own non-plastic straw, tablet-format toothpaste, and wooden toothbrush so that she could avoid the horrors of plastic. The irony had not dawned on her that her microscopic climate impact from these efforts was completely swamped by the emissions needed to make possible her five-week vacation across the Atlantic.

Roughly estimated, the emissions of her round-trip flights add about 3.3 tons of CO2 equivalents to her climate footprint, increasing her average annual German per capita figure by more than one-third — or an entire year’s worth of CO2 emissions for the average person in Botswana. In comparison, eating a plant-based diet saves about 0.8 tons of carbon-equivalent emissions a year according to the Guardian’s rundown.

Taking the most extreme carbon life-cycle-analysis figure for plastic, and presuming that my travel companion’s toys used no resources, her annual climate savings likely amounted to about 800 grams (minus the energy and resource cost going into her toys). Had she stayed home, she could have safely consumed plastic as usual for something like 4,000 years before reaching her emissions from this one round-trip flight. Put differently, it takes about 4,000 years for her reduced plastic use to pay off the climate damage of her five-week Caribbean adventure (or much more if we take into account the energy use and resources going into producing new toothbrushes and straws when they wear out and/or need cleaning).

In another instance of this extraordinary doublethink, I had a flatmate that defended her twice-a-year trip across the Atlantic, London to Vancouver, with some serious mental accounting. Since she would have studied abroad in this phase of her life regardless, the emissions were a sunk cost, as if the environmental damage caused by her behavior were somehow mitigated by her rationalization. Like the vegan traveler above, the meager attempts of biking, reducing plastic use, and eating plant-based foods were entirely swamped by her frequent air travels.

With environmental activists, we can do this all day. A German friend of mine working for DHL, a partly government-owned postal and delivery service, frequently observes criticism about the company’s CO2 footprint — ignoring, of course, that had their customers individually driven to brick-and-mortar stores instead of making their purchases online, the amount of emissions would most likely have been much higher.

Yesterday, like most days during turtle hatching season, volunteers with the ASVO marine preservation organization in Montezuma, Costa Rica, eagerly helped 50 or so newborn turtles into the Pacific. Almost literally rolling out a red carpet — raking the sand to even it out — for these apparently endangered turtles, a handful of mostly European volunteers and a few dozen foreign spectators enjoyed the wonders of seeing these adorable creatures crawl toward their first swim.

The moment the first turtle reached the alluring waters of the sunset-colored waves, a bird of prey swooped down and ate it. So much for a helping human hand: evolution 1; environmentalist do-gooder 0. The artificial concentration of turtles had created a feeding frenzy for predators. The first of many, it seems, as something like only one in every thousand turtles will avoid predators and reach adulthood.

An info brochure from Tambor Bay Turtles proudly states that they have released over 15,000 turtle hatchlings over the last three years. Countless human work hours, eagerly provided by Western environmentalist activists, were spent in ensuring — at best — a permanent increase of the world’s adult turtle population by around 15 animals. All that, purchased with some exorbitant number of flights across the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.

I don’t know what the biodiversity benefit is from 15 extra adult turtles, but I imagine that it’s less than the damage from even a single flight across the Atlantic. Safe to say, if these activists truly cared about the environment as they claim, they would refrain from these sorts of sanctimonious activities. But they don’t. And they feel good about themselves and require praise from their peers.

What angers most people about climate activists is not their goals, but their elaborate system of doublethink, their profound cognitive dissonance, and the truly fascinating ability to rationalize their own behavior; they ignore their own seriously harmful actions while praising themselves for the meager and largely inconsequential benefits of their climate activism.

They view themselves as part of the solution. Perhaps they should reconsider.

Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor at aier.org, where this article first appeared.

A Bleak Future? Young Americans Should Be Worrying About Entitlement Liabilities Rather Than Climate Change.

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On January 31, 1940, Miss Ida Fuller received a check for $22.54. She was the first person to retire under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) scheme, better known as Social Security. At the time of her retirement in 1939, she had paid just $22 in Social Security taxes. Ms. Fuller lived to be 100, cashing over $20,000 worth of Social Security checks.

How Social Security Is Funded

If she had only paid $22.54 in contributions, where did the $20,000 Ms. Fuller received in Social Security payouts come from? It came, as it does now, from the taxpayers of the day. As of 2019, your employer deducts 6.2 percent of your wages up to $132,900 a year, matches this amount, and sends it to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The SSA deposits this with the Treasury, which spends it and receives Treasury bonds in return. This is the fabled trust fund that guarantees Social Security.

But these Treasury bonds are simply IOUs redeemable against the income of tomorrow’s taxpayers. When one of the Treasury bonds held by the SSA falls due for payment, the Treasury can only get the funds to meet this liability by taxing, borrowing (taxing the taxpayers of tomorrow), or printing money (imposing an inflation tax). In each case, what really guarantees Social Security is not the money you paid in but the earnings of today’s or tomorrow’s taxpayers.

Such a pay-as-you-go scheme could chug along well enough as long as there were lots of workers relative to retirees. When the program began, every 100 workers were supporting three retirees.

This favorable ratio encouraged politicians to be more generous. Originally intended to cover only about 50 percent of all workers, Social Security was expanded even before Ida Fuller received her first check to provide benefits for dependents of retired workers and surviving dependents. In the post-war years, Social Security grew further. Disability benefits, payable as early as age 50, were added in 1956, and during the 1950s coverage was extended to other previously excluded workers, making it essentially universal. Congress passed across-the-board benefit increases of 7 percent (1965), 13 percent (1967), 15 percent (1969), 10 percent (1971), 20 percent (1972), and 11 percent (1974). In 1972, benefits were tied to the Consumer Price Index, yielding an annual “cost of living adjustment.”

In 1965, Medicare was signed into law, establishing a heavily subsidized federal health care program for the elderly. Former President Harry Truman and his wife received the first Medicare cards without paying a cent in Medicare taxes.

Like Social Security, Medicare is financed by a payroll tax of 2.9 percent split between employer and employee, up from 0.7 percent in 1966. Like Social Security, that money gets paid right out to meet current expenses, which were vastly expanded by passage of Medicare Part D in 2003. And like Social Security, such a pay-as-you-go scheme could chug along well enough as long as there were lots of workers relative to retirees.

Two things derailed that. US birth rates fell from births 3.65 births per woman in 1965 to 1.80 in 2016, and life expectancy rose from 68 in 1950 to 79 today. Together, this meant ever more retirees relative to the workers supporting them. By 2017, 100 workers were supporting 25 retirees.

These shifting demographics have shredded the solvency of the “trust funds.” Social Security is estimated to run out of reserves in 2034, after which benefits would have to be reduced by about 25 percent to keep spending within available annual revenue. Over 75 years, Social Security has an unfunded liability of $13.9 trillion.

The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will run out of reserves in 2026. Medicare’s second trust fund, for physician and outpatient services and for prescription drugs, is permanently “solvent” because it has an unlimited call on the general fund of the Treasury—the incomes of future taxpayers. Premiums paid by the beneficiaries will cover only about 25 percent of program costs; the rest of the spending is unfinanced. Medicare’s overall unfunded liability over 75 years is more than $37 trillion.

The taxes levied to fund Social Security have already risen drastically. In 1937, the Social Security tax rate was one percent on earnings up to $3,000 ($53,449 in 2019 dollars) to be matched by the employer. By 1971 it was 4.6 percent on earnings up to $7,800 ($49,411 in 2019 dollars). It now stands at 6.2 percent up to $132,900.

This is only going to get worse. According to Census Bureau projections, by 2030 each 100 working-age Americans will be supporting 35 retirees, and this could rise to 42 by 2060. Another way to think of this is to calculate the number of retirees each worker must support. In 1946, the burden of one retiree was shared between 42 workers. Today, according to the SSA, roughly three workers cover each retiree’s Social Security and Medicare benefits. By 2030, however, there will be only two workers supporting each retiree.

In other words, a working couple will have to support not only themselves and their family but also someone outside the family thanks to Social Security and Medicare.

To make Social Security solvent again, the payroll tax rate would need to be hiked immediately from 12.4 percent to 15.2 percent, or Social Security benefits would need to be cut on a permanent basis by about 17 percent. According to economists Roger LeRoy Miller, Daniel K. Benjamin, and Douglass C. North:

[F]or Social Security and Medicare to stay as they are, the payroll tax rate may have to rise to 25 percent of wages over the next decade. And a payroll tax rate of 40 percent is not unlikely by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg recently made international headlines with an impassioned speech to the United Nations in which she complained that her future had been stolen by inaction on climate change. An American Ms. Thunberg’s age could say the same about entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare.

By the expanding eligibility for and hiking the benefits of a pay-as-you-go system while at the same time having fewer children to fund it, the generations preceding that child have left a fearsome financial obligation. Either taxes will go up sharply for the workers of tomorrow, lowering their standard of living, or benefits will go down for the retirees of tomorrow, lowering their standard of living. One group is going to feel pretty angry.

These problems were foreseen even as politicians were hiking payouts. In 1978, the economist Paul Samuelson wrote:

[O]ur Social Security system is also an actuarially unfunded system…there is no obligation for this generation to have children at the same rate as did previous generations. Therefore, when those born during the baby-boom period of the ‘50s reach retirement age in the next century, their stipends will be felt as more of a burden by the thinner ranks of the then working population

We are on the brink of inter-generational strife. We have the political shortsightedness of decades past to thank for that.

John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment

This article first appeared at fee.org.

Climate Activist Mayor Gets On The Wrong Side Of The City’s Own Workers.

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Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has faced a fierce backlash since he announced at last week’s Climate Action Summit that he opposes any new petrochemical companies coming to Western Pennsylvania. Labor unions, civic leaders and even the mayor’s closest political ally have taken him to task.

“When you make a comment that can clearly hurt the advancement of a region and their ability to feed their family and have a better life, that’s when it becomes an issue for us,” said Darrin Kelly, the city firefighter who heads the Allegheny County Labor Council. “I’m going to be very vocal on behalf of the working men and women to protect them, OK? . . . If they’re attacking our way of life, I’m going to come after them.”

The battle is a microcosm of what is happening nationally: Big-city Democratic mayors are aligning themselves with leftist local officials and environmental activists to renounce disfavored industries. It also exposes the Democrats’ deep challenges with blue-collar voters. In both Western Pennsylvania and the Scranton area, the shale industry is opening up prosperity not seen for two generations—and inflaming climate zealots. “A Democrat cannot win Pennsylvania without voter support from those two regions,” said Mike Mikus, a strategist who consulted for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s re-election campaign last year. “And you can’t win the presidency as a Democrat if you lose Pennsylvania.”

The oddity of the latest dustup is that there are no petrochemical plants in Pittsburgh. The build-out in the area is in Beaver County, to the northwest, where the massive $6 billion Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex is under construction and where Exxon may build another nearby. Building the Shell plant is expected to create 6,000 jobs in construction, engineering, chemistry, information technology and geology. Once it opens, industry analysts expect it to employ 600 people permanently and to support twice that number of jobs elsewhere in the local economy. The governor calls it a “game changer” for the region.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Mr. Peduto’s closest ally, is flabbergasted by the mayor’s opposition. He bristles at the suggestion that one can’t favor fracking and mitigating climate change. “I believe in climate change,” he says. “I think it is absolutely real. Anybody who denies that I think is not looking at the science. What natural gas has done has been one of those great additions to lower our carbon footprint.” Natural gas emits 30% less carbon than oil and 45% less than coal.

“No city in America has benefited more from the shale revolution in the last dozen years than Pittsburgh,” Mr. Fitzgerald continues. “We were one of the only regions in the country that did not experience the Great Recession back in 2008, because that’s when we discovered the Marcellus Shale.” He says of Mr. Peduto: “I also think it gets very tricky when somebody who represents one-eighth of the metro region to try to speak for the 2½ million people that represent the 10-county metro region.”

Pittsburgh International Airport last month announced a first-in-the-country microgrid that will power the entire airport using natural gas, drilled on-site by CNX Resources, as well as solar generation. Nick Deluliis, CEO of CNX, says the mayor’s approach to energy would make such a project impossible: “I think people need to understand what the mayor is saying represents a very small minority of people in this region and oftentimes he is operating in a bit of an echo chamber. So his views I don’t think are the working man’s view. It’s not the building trades’ view, it’s not manufacturing’s view, and it’s really not a rational fact-based view.”

Pittsburgh mayors have usually been Democratic pragmatists, concerned above all with making sure the streets are safe, the snow gets plowed and garbage picked up, and civic leaders are able to develop the city. Last week a sinkhole in a city street swallowed a bus as it idled at a red light. A passenger was treated for minor injuries, but the mayor’s reputation was also bruised. The moment became a local metaphor for Mr. Peduto’s emphasis on ideology at the expense of the unpretentious problems of governing.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” President Trump said in 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Mr. Peduto balked at the comparison, yet many locals see him acting as if he were the mayor of Paris and not Pittsburgh.

Mr. Kelly said that since he took on the mayor, he’s been overwhelmed by calls of support from labor. “We are not backing down.”

Ms. Zito is a reporter for the Washington Examiner, a columnist for the New York Post and a co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”

As Intelligent Individuals, We Should All Un-Brainwash Ourselves About Climate Change.

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Whether it’s the Green New Deal, in which climate change abatement is only one of several radical proposals, or the general brainwashing of the younger generations about the impending end of the world, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals. Leaders from around the world will be at it in earnest this week during the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019.

Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.

The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:

  • Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
  • Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.
  • A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.
  • The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.
  • No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
  • To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
  • Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
  • A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.
  • Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.
  • A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.
  • Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.
  • The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons.

This non-exhaustive list illustrates that salvation with respect to energy production does not lie in solar and wind, especially given that it ignores the subject of transportation, where weight and capacity considerations are not trivial. Electric cars are feasible (although they still need a source of electricity to be charged), but electric airplanes are difficult to conceive.

So, where does that leave us? There are several short-term possibilities that might help on the supply side: greater use of hydropower and large-scale and small-scale nuclear. The last of these is largely untapped but intriguing. Consider that hundreds of ships are powered safely and reliably by small-scale nuclear plants. Although not without some problems, these have operated largely uneventfully for many years, and because of their size, they pose manageable risks and waste disposal.

The long-term solution, we believe, is nuclear fusion. There is no significant waste, and the supply of raw ingredients is essentially unlimited. But significant technical obstacles remain, and the most likely timeframe is 30-50 years away.

On the demand side, efficiency measures can and should continue. Household appliances have become drastically more efficient in the last decade or two. Even ordinary gasoline cars have improved greatly. These efforts should continue, although we should not forget that these advances are primarily applicable to industrialized countries. Plug-in Teslas are not likely to take sub-Saharan Africa by storm in the foreseeable future.

Finally, mankind is resourceful enough to find innumerable ways to adapt to climate change. Many of the predictions of planetary doom are almost certainly exaggerated. Common-sense measures such as protecting rain forests, planting more trees, fortifying coastal protection, and abandoning overly vulnerable property will be necessary. But these costs are eminently manageable.

There are also many ingenious approaches to “geoengineering,” the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change; these include solar radiation management and greenhouse gas sequestration.

We are best served by “un-brainwashing” ourselves about climate change — that is, dispensing with the hyperbole and nescience that distract from reality. The drumbeat of the apocalypse may demand responses, but, especially from politicians, so far it has not elicited the right ones.

Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. They were undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

Youth Fighting Climate Change Tell Us: Our Own Habits Are Necessary, Yours Must Change.

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Youth will save the planet, according to the elite narrative about global warming. It was young voters who were “asking the tough questions” and holding “Democrats’ feet to the fire” at last week’s Democratic climate-change pontificon, reported the New York Times. A high school student challenged Julian Castro about his previous support for fracking and demanded to know why “should we trust you . . . to transition our economy to renewables?” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was grilled by a Columbia University student about her possible fealty to the beef and dairy industries. A Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University berated Joe Biden for allowing a natural gas company executive to host a fundraiser for him; fossil-fuel companies are committing “crimes against humanity,” announced this shoo-in for a prestigious professorship.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is—based on informal observation—bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints—whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him.

Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his energy-guzzling mansion. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.

New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.

If the younger generations have any nonpolitical interest in nature, they keep it well hidden. Instagram holds more fascination than forest mosses and lichens; like most air travelers today, the young fly with their seat windows down to reduce the glare on their screens, indifferent to the startling revelations below about geology and topology that John Ruskin and Leonardo da Vinci would have killed to observe.

In short, the young rely on galaxies of goodies beyond count, whose production requires resources, nature-altering infrastructure, and dependable energy systems. The latest environmental crusades—whether banning fracking or plastic straws—are as gossamer bubbles atop this rushing torrent of manufactured consumables.

The children’s crusade for gun control is another alleged example of the purity of spirit of the young. But anti-gun youth crusaders are prepared to give up guns because, in almost all cases, they have none. Similarly, student protesters—whom we are supposed to admire for heroically skipping classes to agitate around their latest grievance—place little value on those classes and suffer no consequences for missing them.

An awareness of one’s own consumption and an attempt to conserve and to eliminate waste are worthy practices. But so is a zeal-tempering humility that should deflate any moral righteousness around such marginal efforts and that recognizes the fantastically un-natural prosperity—the product of Western capitalist enterprise and the rule of law—that underwrites environmental playacting.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal

Global Warming Alarmists Can’t Make A Case. They Offer Statistically Meaningless Data, & Get Cause And Effect Backwards.

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Democrats nearly had a brawl last week in California after the party’s Resolutions Committee rejected a proposed climate debate among Democratic presidential candidates. Global warming so fully occupies the thinking of some that there’s no room for information that will contradict their faith.

If they’d only open their minds they’d see:

The U.S. hasn’t warmed since 2005. America isn’t the entire world. But the alarmists gleefully point out regional heatwaves and the “hottest day on record” when cities endure summer scorchers. So let’s look at the data. The U.S. Climate Reference Network, “a sophisticated climate-observing network specifically designed and deployed for quantifying climate change on a national scale,” has found there’s been no warming in the U.S. going back to 2005.

In fact, says meteorologist Anthony Watts, the “little known data from the state-of-the-art” operation, “(which never seems to make it into NOAA’s monthly ‘state of the climate’ reports) show that for the past nine months, six of them were below normal.”

The data also tell us 2019’s average has been cooler than 2005’s, the first year of the data set.

Man’s carbon dioxide emissions are not burning down the Amazon. Empty-headed celebrities and activists have had quite a virtue-signaling feast tweeting photos from fires three decades ago, fires in Europe, and fires in the U.S. Yes, we’ve seen the claims that there are 80% more fires this year than last in South America, but we’ve also seen this from the New York Times:

“The majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture.”

Of course that’s a disposable detail because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Carbon dioxide increases historically lag temperature increases. “In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years,” writes author Joanne Nova. “Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point — the ‘greenhouse effect’ captured attention. But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.”

Of course the climate crusaders have written at great length to tell us it’s all just a myth. This time, they say, the warming (which is in doubt) is caused by man. It just has to be. All those other warming periods, the alarmists tell us, can be explained by natural events, such as Earth’s orbit around the sun, which, incidentally, we have mentioned as one of many factors that influence climate changes.

Less than 5% of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by man. Web searches turn up what seems like an endless list of stories and blog posts reporting that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached or exceeded 415 parts per million. This has been almost universally treated as the tip of an imminent disaster, as man has pushed greenhouse gas emissions beyond a dangerous threshold. But has he?

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “agrees today’s annual human carbon dioxide emissions are 4.5 ppm (parts per million) per year and nature’s carbon dioxide emissions are 98 ppm per year,” says climate scientist Ed Berry. “Yet, the IPCC claims human emissions have caused all the increase in carbon dioxide since 1750, which is 30% of today’s total.

“How can human carbon dioxide, which is less than 5% of natural carbon dioxide, cause 30% of today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide? It can’t.”

Don’t like Berry’s numbers? Consider another set of figures from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, which says that of the 750 gigatons of CO2 which travel through the carbon cycle every year, only 29 gigatons, or less than 4%, are produced by man.

Is it possible for such a small portion to have such a great influence? Despite what the hysterics tell us, it’s an unanswered question.

There are many other unanswered questions about climate, as well. An honest person would admit that they might remain unanswered forever. An alarmist, however, has his mind made up — and closed down.

Issues & Insights is a new site formed by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. 

 

Profit Is The Only Route To Sustainability, Which Is Why It’s Up To Entrepreneurs To Save The World.

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Profit is a social signal. It’s the signal that people send to those who design, make and offer goods and services for them that they are using society’s resources in a way that society approves of.

People’s well-being is achieved through exchange. They want to exchange the circumstances that they are currently experiencing for some that they perceive may be preferable to them. They’re looking for things to be better. They examine all the goods and services and experiences that are available to them, and they make their choices based on their own preferences. They exchange their earnings, or their savings, or their credit, or their time, or other personal resources for the new ones they think will make their lives better. All human and civilizational advance is achieved through this mechanism.

Who offers them new and potentially better goods and services and experiences? Entrepreneurs do. They are the ones who play the role in society of perceiving when their fellow citizens are feeling some current dissatisfaction and looking for something better, and take on the task of designing and selling that “something”. The citizenry is not usually terribly articulate about describing the “something”, and they can’t invent it themselves, so the entrepreneur does it for them, working largely in the dark, eventually getting to the point of offering the new thing and waiting anxiously for the citizen’s verdict. That verdict is expressed through profit. If the citizens are willing to exchange more with the entrepreneur than it cost to bring the innovation to them, that’s good value to the citizen (they expressed the feeling that “this is worth it”) and a profit to the entrepreneur. Profit encourages the entrepreneur to continue producing, in the knowledge that all the citizens doing business with him or her approve of doing so.

If the citizens don’t buy, or they haggle the price down to a point that makes the endeavor unprofitable for the entrepreneur, then the entrepreneur can not continue. The business is unsustainable. The citizens are saying, in effect, I do not want you to continue using resources in that way. Find another.

Today, we are told that the citizens want entrepreneurs to use energy resources differently today than has been the historic norm. Don’t use coal to generate electricity, don’t drill for oil, don’t transport natural gas in pipelines. Why are we told that this new form of demand for “clean energy” has arisen? Because the citizens want to experience a better lifestyle, one that is unthreatened by the side effects of burning coal, oil and gas: long term damage to the planet and its ecosystem.

That sounds reasonable as a hypothesis. It sounds like citizens might very well find value in removing a so-called threat to their future lifestyle.  They want a better quality of life. And they are pretty savvy about time preference – the notion that one may have to sacrifice or defer a little bit of comfort today in order to gain the opportunity for something better in the future.

But to make that judgment that the citizens should prefer clean energy and its cost structure requires an objective assessment of what they should be valuing. Such judgments are often made by experts, intellectuals, scientists, bureaucrats, and commentators.  Citizens’ perception of value is entirely subjective. It’s idiosyncratic, emotional, and changeable. Which means that it might be different than the experts’ perception. Markets are smarter than experts.

Experts say that there is no higher value than saving the planet. The individual citizens review their own personal value scale and decide that, right now, they disagree. There are some considerations on which they place higher value. There are other ways they prefer to exchange their earnings for value.

Who can change people’s perceptions and get them to ascribe more value to saving the planet? Entrepreneurs – especially those who are good marketers. That’s what entrepreneurs do – they persuade people to readjust their value scales.

Will the installation of solar panels on private home rooftops save the planet? It might help. In Drawdown.org’s list of the 80 most effective solutions for reducing atmospheric CO2, rooftop solar is in the top 10. And rooftop solar is increasingly becoming a consumer choice, because smart entrepreneurial marketers are making it easier and more affordable, and smart entrepreneurial engineers are rapidly bringing down the cost of panels and the cost of generation, so that the value proposition to the citizen is becoming more and more attractive. There are probably over 1 million private homes now with rooftop solar, reflecting good entrepreneurial marketing by profitable companies.

Also appearing in Drawdown’s Top 10 list are reduced food waste and a plant-rich diet. The food we waste, often willfully, accounts for 8% of global emissions.  Who might fix that? Sounds like a job for an entrepreneur who can find a profit in picking it up and recycling it, or devising profit-making methods for cutting out the waste in the first place. Who might persuade consumers to reduce meat consumption and adopt a plant-rich diet? Perhaps great entrepreneurial marketers like those at Beyond Meat, who have found that investors are clamoring to get a piece of the profitable action in meat replacement.

Slightly lower down on the Drawdown list, we find Alternative Cement – Drawdown estimates that there are 6.69 gigatons of atmospheric CO2 reduction available by 2050 with some simple innovations in cement manufacture and ingredients. Sounds like another job for entrepreneurs.

Way down at the bottom of the list are the solutions the experts are pressing on us, like electric cars (not in the Top 25) and retrofitting of buildings and cities (last on the list at number 80). These are the central planners’ solutions, the ones to which they direct their regulations and subsidies and grand plans. They want to impose their bad and unworkable and uneconomic ideas on an uncomprehending public – a public far better placed to make intelligent decisions based on their individual value scales. The planners’ values are collectivist – good for “us”, good for “the earth”, good for “society”.

Entrepreneurs take a different approach: what do the citizens really want? The only way to tell is by experimenting and innovating to discover which initiatives will be rewarded by the citizen with a profit.

 

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