What’s New in the War Over the Environment?

Originally published by Charles Sartain.

Is the world hurtling irreversibly toward incinerating, extinction-causing, fossil-fuel induced destruction while we’re doing nothing about it? Maybe not, if you consider overlooked and ignored sources of information.

We You will always have Paris

Despite bailing out of the Paris Climate Accord, the United States led the world in reducing CO2 emissions in 2019. If so, one might ask why we should be a part of it.

Said another way, the US approach works and the Paris way doesn’t.

And Bjorn Lomborg reports on the futility of the Paris promises. His contrarian view of the fires in Australia is behind a paywall.

Battle of the charts

Grist magazine published seven charts proclaiming that during the last decade ….

• Atmospheric CO2 rose 25 ppm;
• Climate change got expensive;
• More and more people believe it’s getting hot and it’s our fault;
• There is a widening partisan divide when it comes to the environment;
• Coal continues its death spiral, solar skyrocketed, but fossil fuels still dominate;
• Coal flatlined and the price of renewables dropped precipitously.

Anthony Watts responded with charts of his own that tell a different story …

• Increased CO2 is greening the continents;
• Normalized weather disaster costs paint a different picture;
• It is not necessarily getting hotter;
• Worldwide action on climate change ranks very low on the list of citizens’ concerns;
• The decline of coal is market-driven rather than a nod to environmental concerns;
• Solar doesn’t work without baseload generation by natural gas;
• Renewables cost less because of generous government subsidies through tax credit programs.

See his link for eight reasons why the world has just had its best decade in human history.

Does the industry glow in the dark?

Rolling Stone scandalized oil production as producing untold tons of radioactive waste.

Energy In Depth pushed back.

Power to the people

In addition to an immediate fracking ban upon taking office, Comrade Bernie proposes a federal takeover of electricity production.

But blacklisting ended in the’50’s … ?

McCarthyite Skepitcal Science outs researchers, journalists and politicians whom it considers to be “science misinformers”. The purpose, of course, is to ostracize those voices into silence. One such victim is respected Georgia Tech Professor Judith Curry, whom they would like to make “unhireable”, as reported in Forbes magazine by Roger Pielke.

The worste case isn’t

The journal Nature reports that the “worst-case scenario” repeated ad nauseum with no investigation isn’t the accurate, much less the best, data on which to base policy.

Were you nice to your valentine … or not?

 

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