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Signs of Peak Progressivism
Last week at a Capitol Hill hearing, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair was flummoxed when confronted with the inconvenient truth of an eighteen-year-and-counting cessation of global warming. Under persistent questioning from presidential contender Ted Cruz, Mair had only the flimsiest appeal-to-authority by way of response — boiled down, the discredited assertion that 97 percent of scientists agree with whatever the left is pushing this election cycle.
This exchange, transcribed at PJ Media, is particularly illuminating:
Cruz: Is it correct that the satellite data over the past 18 years demonstrate no significant warming?
Mair: No.
Cruz: How is it incorrect?
Mair, after consulting with his staff: Based on our experts, it’s been refuted long ago, and it’s not up for a scientific debate.
The Progressive catechism teaches that, in Mair’s words, “our planet is cooking and heating up and warming,” no matter the actual data.
Global warming is the most important global issue of our time. Islamic State beheading its way across the Middle East is positively jayvee compared to climate change. Pay no attention to Russian military adventures in Syria, or China’s incipient hegemony over the South China Sea. You need to live a harder and meaner lifestyle because, well, because that is the very definition of leadership.
President Obama explains in his recent interview with Steve Kroft:
Steve Kroft: He’s [Putin is] challenging your leadership, Mr. President. He’s challenging your leadership–
President Barack Obama: Well Steve, I got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we’ve got a different definition of leadership. My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we’ll get in Paris.
Sometimes you have to wonder if Mr. Obama lives at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry rather than the White House.
But our President is not alone. Exhibit A: California Governor Brown, who, it would seem, has leadership bursting from every pore. CalWatchdog reports:
Gov. Jerry Brown warned at a recent climate change workshop that trillions of dollars, the transformation of our way of life and a worldwide mobilization on the scale of war will be required to stave off climate change’s “existential threat” to mankind.
Brown also said the problem is so complex that it’s likely no one knows how to solve it.
California already mandates a 2030 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 40 percent compared to 1990. Brown is targeting an astounding 80 percent decrease by 2050, when, like a political cicada, the once-and-future governor will presumably be ready for another season as chief executive of America’s zaniest state.
That’s leadership.
Brown acknowledges that this science stuff is hard:
I come today because this is a topic that is not easy to grasp,” he said. “It’s complicated. The more you dig into controlling air pollution or measuring greenhouse gas emissions or attempting to understand the [climate] models that examine and attempt to predict how world climate patterns will change over time, it definitely is a very complicated science that we mere lay people just get little glimpses of.
Nevertheless, the little glimpses are enough to reach the only possible scientific conclusion, the one that fits tongue-and-groove into the Progressive edifice. The science is settled. There is no debate. We must mobilize.
So when we say we are going to reduce [emissions by] 10 percent, 20 percent, 40 percent, we are setting forth a huge challenge that is very easy to state. But anybody who has any understanding of what is implied by what is being called for, realizes this cannot be done lightly or without a mobilization globally that we have never seen before outside of time of war.
As with any war, pain and sacrifice will be necessary for everyone without access to a private jet.
It will also require Californians driving a lot less, he said, by living closer to where they work and telecommuting. “Californians drive over 330 billion miles a year – 32 million vehicles of various kinds moving around on almost entirely fossil fuel,” he said. “We’re going to reduce and take fossil fuels out of our lives and out of the economy.
More leadership: You will live closer to work. You will telecommute. You will take fossil fuels out of your life. No doubt you will enjoy it, too, or else.
However, no matter how brilliant our Progressive masterminds, they inevitably find themselves caught short by reality. In California, nobody has yet figured out how to refuel all of these mandatory, expensive, short-range electric vehicles. From Saturday’s New York Times:
In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly
SAN FRANCISCO — Of all the states, California has set the most ambitious targets for cutting emissions in coming decades, and an important pillar of its plan to reach those goals is encouraging the spread of electric vehicles.
But the push to make the state greener is creating an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner.
The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. Electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another’s cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window.
How do you achieve Green Nirvana when the mandated alternative to the gasoline-powered automobile has limited range and a refueling time measured in hours rather than minutes? No worries, Progressives have a knack for spreading the pain and misery of artificial scarcity. The trick is to present the Darwinian nastiness as market failure, not the inevitable result of state-directed social engineering, thereby justifying additional regulation.
Like most hangover cures, another shot of regulation in the morning is not a viable long-term solution.
Meanwhile, the world’s jayvee teams continue to limber up for the main event. Reality has a funny way of reasserting itself over time. My sad prediction: A few short years from now, climate change will not be anyone’s pick for the most significant threat facing our planet.
Published in Environment
Well, have the solar plant managers talk with dem folks who manage wind turbines. They have been granted a 30-year waiver by the EPA that allows them to continue to kill an estimated 140,000 and 328,000 birds in the U.S. each year.
EPA: Hypocrisy on stilts.
Yup. I’ve been following the wind turbine issue too.
So we don’t spray DDT, which would kill the moose-killing ticks (moose herds are getting dangerously small in northern New England because of ticks), because it weakens the shells of baby birds. So we are supposed to save those birds, even if the mosquitoes and ticks kill all of us. But we install monstrous heat-generating solar panels (and tell me again how that stops global warming? by concentrating solar heat into heat-generating machines that cover thousands of square acres?) and wind turbines that kill thousands of birds a year.
These people should be locked up for their own sake as well as ours.
Should have noted that the bird estimate includes many, many bald eagles
DDT is actually a perfectly safe insecticide. Silent Spring author Rachel Carson’s claim that the chemical weakened egg shells was later debunked, as was the claim that it is a human carcinogen.
An EPA administrative law judge who, in response to the uproar over Carson’s book, heard months of testimony on DDT, found it to be completely safe. Unfortunately, he was overruled by Administrator William Ruckelshaus, who banned the product without bothering to attend or read the proceedings.
Critically, DDT was banned after the scourge of malaria was eliminated in developed countries but before this could be achieved in the poorer regions of the globe. Consequently, 50 million people–disproportionately African children–have died needlessly; another million die each year even now, all to make liberals feel good about ameliorating a make-believe environmental threat.
That must be conflicting for the greenies. On the one hand, they’re an endangered species. On the other, a symbol of American chauvinism.
I like the spirit of your point, but need to make a correction. Bald eagles used to be quite endangered, but they’ve made a comeback. They are no longer on the endangered list.
It appears progressives are attempting to fix that problem. You cannot not let a crisis go to waste if you don’t have a crisis.
Seawriter
I’m not picking on anyone in particular, this question is for everybody. If (and it’s a big if, I know) the cost of wind turbines came down and efficiency went up to the point where wind farms could operate profitably without government subsidies, how many of you would oppose them because some birds get killed? Because my only objection to wind and solar is because they are subsidized. It’s anti-free market. I don’t particularly care about a few birds, and I’m very skeptical that there are large piles of dead birds around wind turbines.
I look forward to the day that engineers develop wind and solar power plants that are efficient enough that they are cost effective. In the meantime, let’s nuke up.
Randy, I mostly ran my cheese plant 24 hours. I don’t think wind and solar will ever allow that. I think the average person only thinks of their personal use of energy when discussing the subject. At my plant a one hour power failure could cost as much five thousand dollars. Yes l could have backup generators but wouldn’t that defeat the idea. I think wind and solar are the leisure suits of this age.
I agree, given current technology. But a hundred years ago the airplane was a novelty. It would have been preposterous at the time to suggest that air travel would displace railroads for moving lots of people long distances. And it would have been stupid for the government to try to hamstring railroads, in order to promote airplane travel.
Given some major technical breakthroughs in power plants and batteries (on the scale of the difference between the Wright Brothers plane and the airplanes of the jet age) we could find that wind and solar are quite viable. If the Rush Limbaughs of the world are correct and we’ll never have anything better than fossil fuels, we’re screwed. We’re not going to run out anytime soon, but it’s not going to last forever.
Several hundred years in the US alone – and quite possibly thousands. Many people now theorize that fossil fuels are naturally produced in the earth at a substantial rate.
Are you sure it is going to run out? Evidence is accumulating that hydrocarbon fuels are the product of plate tectonics, which means they are a renewable resource.
For that matter, the Sun will not last forever, either, and then we are really screwed.
Seawriter
Are these hydrocarbons being created near the surface or several miles down? Are they being created as fast as we would like to consume them?
Give me a study grant as big as the ones the AGW folks get and I can get you the answers to those questions.
Seawriter
At some point we will have renewable biofuels to replace the stuff drilled from the ground. I am aware of several University programs that are doing the hybrid work for developing plants that can be readily broken down by algae and their “waste” product is fairly close to diesel fuel. The issues revolve around the shell that are on most monocot grasses. they have been working developing an “editable” shell. I can also envision the other approach, given how the kids are practically programing the DNA of small organism in the lab, of creating an algae that can process the shell as well.
If you are harvesting the grass and directly going into an algae processing facility then you are not adding net carbon to the environment. (i.e. carbon into the atmosphere is being pulled out at the same rate by the plants, and not net increase from previously stored carbon).
Researchers think they are a few years out, I’ll wager it is more like a few decades. But that is small potatoes in the overall scheme and the energy content of diesel systems vs battery systems, and the handling and infrastructure aspect of our mobile society is not to be trifled. (Volkswagen’s perceived transgressions notwithstanding)
The final step is to make the process energy (i.e. economically) viable. To me it looks like a matter of engineering, but not of the scale of the all elusive fusion power efforts (where you cannot yet get more bang than that buck it took to make the bang)
Great points, GLD III. It’s been my thought for some time that if we’re ever going to have cost-effective biofuels, we’re probably going to need to engineer plants that are optimized for it, and bacteria that is more efficient at converting the plant matter into usable fuel.
They have had millions of years of practice…We just need to give it a nudge to our benefit.
Wait just a cotton-picking minute. Does this mean that Saturn’s moon Titan never had dinosaurs after all?
And if they aren’t really “fossil fuels” but, I suppose, “rock fuels” then perhaps we will be allowed to continue using ’em.