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If You’re Serious About Climate…
Do you ever wonder why people run for office? I mean, unless you’re a total cynic, you must assume that at least part of the motivation is wanting to do good. Sure, you want fame and prestige, but you also have strongly held views and want to affect public policy, right? So why in the world would you engage in sabotage of the ideas you hope to advance?
That’s undeniably what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have done with their juvenile Green New Deal.
Consider: The caricature of environmentalists is that they are just using climate change as a stalking horse for their true agenda, which is to socialize the entire economy. And lo and behold, what does the Green New Deal resolution call for? Net zero carbon emissions in 10 years, universal health care, guaranteed jobs for all, family leave, paid vacations, refurbishing every single building in the country to meet environmental standards, eliminating nuclear power, and on and on. In fact, most of the resolution doesn’t even address climate change. Here’s a flavor:
To promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);
Okaaaaay. So what Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have achieved, along with all of the Democrats who’ve endorsed this childish wish list, is to make themselves look like dummies, and to reinforce the impression that they are totally unserious about combating climate change.
If they were committed to mitigating what they claim to believe is a looming catastrophe, you might imagine that they would study the question for at least a few minutes, and even swallow hard and make some tough choices about the way forward. That’s what others have done.
Recently, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement noting that the “sobering realities” of climate change “dictate that we keep an open mind about all of the tools in the emissions reduction toolbox – even ones that are not our personal favorites.” In other words, they don’t like nuclear power, but they concede that it is necessary.
As Sam Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project points out, renewables get all the love, but they are simply incapable of meeting the energy demands of our whole economy. It’s not that the sun goes down at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. It’s that in some regions, the sun gets weak and the wind stops blowing for months at a time. Batteries are improving, but not fast enough to make an all-renewables power grid practical for some time.
Other technologies, by contrast, are on the shelf and ready to go. Nuclear power, though it gives left-wingers the shakes, is safe and reliable. The accidents make headlines, but nuclear plants have not been responsible for a single death in the United States. Three Mile Island caused no damage to human beings. Even Russia’s 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, which caused many to predict tens of thousands of cancer deaths in its wake, has shown nothing of the kind. A 2015 National Institutes of Health paper found that “In spite of the best efforts of statisticians and epidemiologists, the claimed Chernobyl-induced cancers and mutations have yet to manifest themselves.” And the U.S. has been using compact nuclear reactors for decades in submarines and aircraft carriers without a single accident.
The greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were achieved by France in the 1970s and 80s when that country made a big switch to nuclear energy. They reduced their carbon emissions by 2 percent per year, while still providing their people with affordable energy.
Carbon capture is showing promise too. Net Power has opened a new natural gas plant in La Porte, Texas that buries all of the excess carbon dioxide underground.
None of the choices we face is cost free. But if people are serious about addressing climate change, they must, at the very least, acknowledge the simple reality that you cannot stamp your foot and demand that the entire U.S. economy be transformed in 10 years. Evaluate the trade-offs. Be serious, or risk becoming a joke and making your issue a punchline too.
Published in Environment
We started emitting carbon from coal burning in 1750. 25% of all of the carbon emitted was from between 1997 and 2015, when every single climate model broke. I love that.
Our only option is to invade China and India.
Excellent! Especially “childish wish list.” Doesn’t surprise me, though. I edit books for university presses. Right now I’m working on a project in which the very same kind of language you quoted from the GND is viewed as positing something when it’s just critique posing as critical thinking. It does seem impossible to conceive, but I think Ocasio-Cortez and Markey believe that those like me who disagree with this kind of language-thinking are actually the ones engaging in self-sabotage. Nothing short of radically transforming the world will do. And even that will not satisfy.
Somebody needs to ask what she sets her thermostat on at home.
I observed that “progressives” are generally worshipful of Europe and its supposed superiority to the US…with one special exception—nuclear power. They have no interest in learning from France’s very successful use of that technology.
A near-total cynic might point out that there is no other job in the world that requires zero experience or qualifications and yet pays so well with a guaranteed four-year contract.
Yeah this was good article but it kind of lost me here too. I am a total cynic about this.
Generally I applaud this post.
Your key quote:
“Okaaaaay. So what Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have achieved, along with all of the Democrats who’ve endorsed this childish wish list, is to make themselves look like dummies, and to reinforce the impression that they are totally unserious about combating climate change.
If they were committed to mitigating what they claim to believe is a looming catastrophe, you might imagine that they would study the question for at least a few minutes, and even swallow hard and make some tough choices about the way forward. That’s what others have done.”
What you have acknowledged I think is:
A. The AOC-Markey Plan is not even remotely serious and is in fact an embarrassment to anyone who is seriously interested in the environment.
B. The plan is a stalking horse for heavy handed Socialism and government control.
C. The plan does not want to consider the real consequences that it will produce.
D. The AOC/Markey plans bans more practical solutions to the environmental in deference to more politically correct solutions that reek of magical thinking.
So far so good, but the most fundamental problem I see with this plan is how strongly so many people, who are fairly well educated and should know better, so firmly endorse this AOC/Markey plan and how they go almost violently unhinged and berserk when challenged about whether it should be done this way or that or even whether it will work. How so many people became so pathologically brainwashed is a real problem for trying to solve our energy and environmental problems moving forward. In any design process that tries to resolve such an enormously complex problem, every move has multiple multi-faceted, untold and often unforeseen consequences which require careful and rational consideration in a matrix of almost unbelievable complexity. To be led by such brainwashed , unhinged, ill tempered charlatans dooms this effort likely to unmitigated failure and likely disaster.
Foremost in the effort by MS AOC is the scare tactic that the world will end in 12 years due to some sort of looming CO2 induced anthropological global warming or climate change disaster that we requires the world to resort to draconian, socialistic and dictatorial measures to avoid such a world ending calamity without providing any sufficiently scientific proof. In fact, we are threatened with this calamity in the face of mounting scientific data that we may face a very difficult “solar minimum” which in the past has caused great death and destruction irrespective of CO2 production.
It’s not about climate at all. It’s about power so it’s not even about real socialism. There have to be enough big private companies left to pay them the big bucks they’re after. And if that growing but younger and insane wing of the Democrat party wins, of course the centralized big companies they will have created won’t give power to ignorant idiots, they’ll just own them and tell them what to say, or replace them. The bad news is the insanity may empower such people for long enough to do real long term damage that we may not be able to recuperate from; big government doesn’t shrink.
Um, it’s a two year contract.
CO2 is a requirement for life on this planet. More CO2 is better, if you are a fan of living things. Humans have saved life on this planet by freeing CO2, something which nature cannot do sufficiently to offset that which is locked up by shellfish. Everyone should read about the miracle of CO2 and coal.
I’d like to add that, if someone in the current administration had proffered something this ridiculous they would be receiving the mockery they and it properly and objectively deserve. I really do think that, media-wise, what-to-cover has pretty much devolved into looks + the proper political lens.
These folks are dead serious about “climate change,” which is really just a metaphor a fourth founding of the country, (1776, 1789, 1865, ????), to be founded upon a single goal—the redistribution of wealth. They just can’t turn their ideas into laws and regulations yet.
The US is one of the leading environmentally-conscious countries in the world. It’s other large, developed countries that aren’t complying. Human being are being brutalized around the world by thug regimes and belief systems – it seems this should be the priority, removing or transforming these countries, but there will always be the poor and struggling. You can only control so much, and the sun or other atmospheric changes that have happened since there was a climate, isn’t one of them.
“You can only control so much”
The other point of that idea is while the US is the leading environmental nation, we alone could not by ourselves, if this anthropologic global warming catastrophe were really such a huge dire earth killing problem, change the course of the environment. The rest of the world, particularly China and India, would have to pitch in a much bigger way than they are now which is of course not going to happen in any meaningful way. Draconian restrictions in the US could only do so much and cannot make up for the untold pollutants countries like China pump into the atmosphere.
I have argued before that previous draconian restrictions upon American industry have pushed the major polluting industries to migrate to much less regulated foreign shores like China with the net effect of greater toxins and pollutions produced worldwide rather than less, exacerbating the problem rather than solving. Progressives are seemingly immune from addressing the real consequences of their actions and that is one of the major reasons why their environmental programs cannot be taken seriously.
DING. DING. DING.
The whole planet is ruled by stupid and selfish fascists.
The rare earth pollution in China is supposed to be absolutely mind boggling.
Also, don’t ever learn anything about cobalt mining, unless you want to feel bad.
You forgot 1932.
Paul Ryan kept his carbon footprint down, why can’t she?
If you like your air conditioner, you can keep your air conditioner. Nobody is going to take it away from you. If you like your big refrigerator, you can keep your big refrigerator. If you like your sports car, you can keep your sports car. If you like your big TV, you can keep your big TV. You won’t have to pay any more for it. You won’t be assessed a “green tax,” whose purpose is to disincentivize you from keeping these things or from buying them in the first place.