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Greta’s A Human Shield To Protect The Davos Elite Alarmists From Criticism. So They Allow Her To Lecture Them.

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Swedish teen Greta Thunberg scolded the political and business aristocracy Tuesday at the World Economic Forum, insisting “that we start listening to the science and that we actually start treating this crisis as the crisis it is.” Why is she continually treated as a savant and prophetess when she has nothing to offer but embellishment?

Though only 17, Greta is an accomplished nag, a word we don’t use lightly, but it fits because she is perpetually badgering and complaining. In her speech, which the New York Times posted in transcript form as if it were actually important and must be preserved for future generations, she demanded international leaders “immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels.

“We don’t want these things done by 2050, or 2030 or even 2021,” she said, “we want this done now.”

She even went so far as to tell the Davos crowd “our house is still on fire,” and declared “your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour.”

Of course “our house” – the world we live in – isn’t on fire, though large parts of Australia are, and that generates not only news but wild speculation from the zealots and the political operators that man’s greenhouse gas emissions are responsible. The evidence, however, indicates that green environmental policy is responsible.

The story is the same in California, where wildfire season produced global headlines. It was green policies, not anthropogenic global warming, that charred the state.

Given the magnitude of the exaggerations that pour out of Greta’s mouth, why was she even invited to speak at Davos, and before that at the United Nations? Why would adults name her Time magazine’s person of the year? Why wasn’t the very idea of her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize laughed at by the Nobel Committee?

There are no substantive arguments made during her public tantrums. She just makes the same tired points that have been debunked on this site enough that we won’t take the time to list them in this editorial. Those who want to refresh their memories can look back at previous editorials here, here, and here.

Greta gets a pulpit and the rock-star treatment because she’s a novelty. She’s a human shield to protect the alarmists from criticism. Adults screaming for attention and the approval of their peers think she provides them with cachet. And don’t forget, she talks back to that mean President Donald Trump.

Despite Greta’s plaints that her future has been stolen, we just finished the best year in human history, says New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

“2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases,” Kristof writes.

“Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.”

Doomsdayers hope to convince us the future is nevertheless bleak. But 2019 came at the end of “the best decade in human history,” so we’re in an upward arc and there’s nothing to suggest that the advances in the human condition won’t continue to improve.

This is not unknown to the Davos organizers, yet Greta is asked to be a part of the program, in fact a main attraction. What this tells us is the ruling class in the West is exhausted, impotent, and would rather be popular than do the right thing.

This article first appeared at Issues and Insights.

Issues & Insights

The Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Proved Hydrocarbon Oxidation Cleans Humanity’s Environment – Alex Epstein

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“What is more important, the environment or the economy?” It is better to ask, “Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?” Without earth’s environment there is no economy. Human survival requires we transform an ecosystem that is dirty and dangerous to one that is clean and accommodates human flourishing. Poetic Justice Warrior Alex Epstein explains this masterfully in his 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

The key words are “The Moral Case.” Owning the moral high ground is essential to winning the intellectual and political fight. Taking the low road are the forces conspiring to eliminate fossil fuels, the ones we define as the “Climateers.”

Research grant recipients, politicians, teachers, media windbags, wind lobbyists, and carbon bankers holding a government commission authorized for use in economic warfare, especially in the capture and dismantling of enemy merchant hydrocarbon production systems.

The 97% Solution

Today, it’s urban legend that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is caused by human activity. After all, Senators Al Gore and John Kerry told us so. According to Epstein, so did John Cook, et al in a study of hundreds of research abstracts published in a 2013 paper that popularized the 97% consensus.

Suspicious, economist David Friedman studied the report and calculated that only 1.6% (not 97%) of the research explicitly stated that burning hydrocarbons caused more then 50% of global warming. Cook called this group “explicit endorsement with quantification.” The rest of the 97% he classified as “explicit endorsement without quantification,” or better yet, “implicit endorsement.” In other words, a big, big lie repeated over and over again. Several of the scientists surveyed in the study claim their work was misrepresented.

The compelling thing about Epstein’s work is that he acknowledges the facts about CO2 emissions, their greenhouse effects, rising temperatures, and their impact on human and plant life. For example, hydrocarbon oxidation contributes to the greenhouse effect, the fertilizer effect, and the energy effect. But since Climateers only focus on the greenhouse effect, it’s fair to ask, what is its magnitude? Is it linear (every new CO2 molecule adds one unit of heat), is it an accelerating effect, or is it a diminishing effect? Yet almost all people including so-called experts who bemoan the mortal danger of CO2 can’t answer this question.

As Epstein reports, the greenhouse effect is extremely diminishing (Myhre, et al). Despite record levels of emissions since 1988, temperatures have not increased since the late 1990s. Based on objective analysis, it makes sense that an increase in atmospheric CO2 from less than 300 parts per million to about 400 parts per million, both trace quantities, result in average global temperatures increasing (according to NASA) 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last 150 years. This is good for human and plant life.

Complex Systems Defy Modeling

The Climateers can’t abide this. There must be other co-dependent variables, such as water vapor effects, that require sophisticated modeling. Epstein explains their hubris as,

Equating the proven greenhouse effect with the speculative theory that CO2 emissions are dramatically amplified by other atmospheric effects and lead to rapid warming. If a politician talks about the social costs of carbon, or an economist talks about negative externalities, they’re based on model predictions.

There is no evidence that computer models can predict the future of complex, dynamic systems. The financial crisis of 2008 and its massive retirement plan losses is one example. Additionally, Poetic Justice Warrior economist Jesus Huerta de Soto explained that calculations designed for mechanical physics were useless in a dynamic world. He proved that econometric models based on static assumptions missed the crisis. But finance and economics are minor details to the Climateers. They are selling global warming as an existential threat that demands global political solutions. But Epstein explains,

Every climate model based on CO2 has been a failure. Unfortunately, many of the scientists, public intellectuals, and media members have not been honest about their failed predictions. They are attracted to a theory that contradicts reality, they pretend that reality is different from what it is, to the point of extremely dangerous dishonesty.

Political and economic power are the Climateers holy grail. Earth’s actual history of climate change is irrelevant to them. It doesn’t matter that fossil fuels cannot explain the Roman and Medieval warming periods that coincided with two of the greatest advancements in human history.

The Morality of Economic Systems

The Climateers’ fixation on the greenhouse effect panders to fear of imminent death and steals the dreams of the young people they have indoctrinated. In stark contrast, Epstein understands that carbon “has enabled billions of people to live longer and more fulfilling lives.” He focuses on all aspects of hydrocarbon oxidation including fertilization and energy. For example, the fertilization effect is greening spaceship earth as you read this. Additionally, the energy effect is having magnificent consequences for human flourishing.

Epstein explains this by solving the Climateers false premise that “we are taking a stable, safe, climate and making it dangerous.” His logical premise is that with fossil fuels “we are making our volatile, dangerous climate safer.”

Earth’s environment will frequently overwhelm human beings with climate related risks. Primitive peoples prayed fervently to climate gods because they were at the mercy of this volatile and dangerous system. Fossil fuels amplify our ability to adapt to climate, to maximize the benefits we get from good weather, and minimize the risks from bad weather.

The use of fossil fuels in our modern era coincides with a massive increase in life expectancy and population, cleaner water (World Bank) and air (US EPA), increasing oil, natural gas, food production, and fewer climate-related deaths. The dirty environment of food bacteria, poisonous plants, infectious diseases, and rodent infestation have largely been solved. How did this happen? The integration of human ingenuity, technology, energy, and the environment are the only morally defensible system for human life on planet earth.

The Immorality of Government Force

Conversely, wind and solar are unreliable and based on dangerous economics. For example, how much energy is consumed in the extraction of raw materials for a wind turbine? Their refinement and transport to parts manufacturers? The energy expended for their fabrication, engineering, transportation, assembly, installation and maintenance? How does this compare to the energy they generate, or their horrid environmental impact? No one knows, and the Climateers don’t care.

As Epstein contends, they really care about disintegration. “Fewer people, with fewer desires, and fewer ambitions. Human nonimpact is their standard of value, without regard for human life and happiness. This is the exact opposite of holding human life as one’s standard of value.” According to history professor Burton Folsom,

Before 1870, only the rich could afford whale oil and candles. With the drop in the price of kerosene, working-class people all over the nation could afford the one cent an hour that it cost to light their homes at night. Working and reading became after-dark activities new to most Americans.

Poetic Justice Warrior Alex Epstein makes the case best for human life as the standard of value,

In our natural climate human beings are sick as dogs and drop like flies. Technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it. With cheap energy we can achieve a stunning mastery over any climate hazard, natural or man-made. Nature is a wondrous background that gives us the potential for an amazing life, if we transform it.

As poetic justice would have it, Epstein has been honored by Rolling Stone’s Top 10 List of Global Warming’s Denier Elite.

Democrats’ Campaign Promise: We’ll Destroy America’s Energy Sector … And Economy.

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Eight of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates say they want to ban fracking. Eleven others would limit the process or “regulate it better,” says the Washington Post. Could these politicians possibly be that ignorant of how ruinous their prohibition lust would be in the real world?

First, let’s get it straight why the political left hates hydraulic fracturing. It’s not because it’s an environmental threat. They know it’s clean process and has been both an ecological and economic boom, in no small part due to the increased production of natural gas, a cleaner alternative to coal for producing electricity.

No, the left loathes fracking because it is so efficient in taking fossil fuel out of the ground.

Crude production in the U.S. has spiked since 2008, rising from roughly 5 millions barrels a day to almost 11 million barrels in 2018, 17% higher than 2017, says the government’s Energy Information Administration. In December of last year, the country produced 11.96 million barrels per day, an all-time record.

The growth, says the EIA, was “driven mainly by production from tight rock formations using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. EIA projects that U.S. crude oil production will continue to grow in 2019 and 2020, averaging 12.3 million b/d and 13.0 million b/d, respectively.”

Meanwhile, natural gas production has soared from 18.05 trillion cubic feet in 2005 to 30.44 trillion cubic feet in 2018. The increase has nearly eliminated the need for imports. According to the EIA, the U.S. consumed 29.97 trillion cubic feet in 2018. Again, “most of the production increases since 2005 were the result of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques.”

America is now the fossil fuel king. We are more energy independent, more energy secure, thanks to fracking.

Yet the Democrats want to turn the energy production clock back decades if not centuries. A comment made by a campaign spokesman for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who not long ago tweeted that “fossil fuel executives should be criminally prosecuted for the destruction they have knowingly caused” — that someone who holds such a childish view can be elected to any office in this country is alarming — epitomizes the Democratic field’s closed-minded view on fracking.

“No amount of regulation can make it safe,” the aide told the Washington Post. “When (Sanders) is in the White House, he is going to ban fracking nationwide and rapidly move to 100% clean, sustainable energy.”

How will Sanders, or any other Democrat elected president, replace the lost energy? Windmills? Sunshine? Those “sustainable” sources are not up to the task, and likely won’t be for some time, no matter how much their supporters fantasize about renewable prices competing with conventional fuels.

The true believers imagine that the 25-year contract the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power signed to buy “record low” solar power is a watershed moment in renewables. But the Mojave Desert facility will provide no more than 7% of Los Angeles’ electricity needs and cannot generate more than four hours of power at night.

Wind has similar limitations. Not only is power storage a glaring weakness, there are acreage problems. A wind farm needs 100 times more land than a natural-gas plant to create the same amount of energy. A recent government report from Michigan found the state would have to more than double its 1,107 windmills to replace one of its coal-gas plants.

Under a Democratic administration, America would be forced into a Third World energy experience enforced by bureaucratic cranks, and supported by naive, sanctimonious, and in some cases completely detached-from-reality Democrat voters.

This is to say nothing of the economy, which would take a jackbooted kick in the head. (And might have been saved from the previous administration’s recession-friendly policies by fracking in Texas and North Dakota.) The American Petroleum Institute reckons that a “keep it in the ground” policy, which includes a fracking ban, would result in job losses ranging from “3.5 million to 5.9 million,” elevating “the unemployment rate to over 7% throughout much of the 2020‐2040 period.”

At the same time, APR estimates a cumulative loss in gross domestic product would reach “$823 billion by 2020 and $11.8 trillion by 2040.”

Even if the job and economic losses were actually half, even a quarter, of those estimates, why would any serious-minded person think keeping fossil fuels in the ground is reasonable policy?

He or she wouldn’t, but the Democrats have been captured by a far-over-the-edge green activist bloc made up of global warming hysterics, anti-capitalists, envy-driven militants, assorted socialists, and middle- and upper-class virtue-signalers clamoring for attention and significance.

So they are comfortable perpetuating myths, as Sanders’ aide did when he declared “fracking is a danger to our water supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe. It has resulted in more earthquakes” and is “highly explosive.” These claims have all the credibility of a Bill Clinton denial, and the gravitas of playground logic. Yet they are currency in a Democratic Party that should be embarrassed rather then emboldened by them.

Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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