Happy End of the World Day, Part One

The Climate Cult's High Priestess predicted 5 years ago the world would end Wednesday. She's not alone. That's proven as fruitful as Climate Agenda solutions.

When Greta Thunberg speaks, people listen. And her doomsday proclamations, while not consistently accurate, are undoubtedly profitable.

“In a recent survey of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries - i.e., the rich countries in the world - about 60 percent of respondents said they believe that global warming will likely lead to the end of mankind,” Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a social scientist, told Hillsdale University in April.

But Ms. Thunberg, who finally graduated from high school this month, is far from alone in the failure and fearmongering of climate-related prognostications. Worse, perhaps, is that many climate-driven solutions may be doing more harm than good.

A few years before former Vice President Al Gore boasted of helping create the internet, he wrote perhaps the most unusual campaign book. It helped elect him Vice President the year it was published, 1992.

It was called “Earth in the Balance.” Most campaign books are vapid biopics and bland policy prescriptions, like this one, this one, and this one, but not Gore’s, which should be credited for launching the current Climate Change “movement” in earnest. Fourteen years later, Gore doubled down with a second book, followed by a movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Many ecologists and others predate Gore’s environmental leadership - some would say alarmism - with predictions of apocalypse long before now, led by famous “ecologist” Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s.

Even though Gore sticks to his script, Ehrlich and Gore have largely proven famously wrong. Ehrlich, still alive, is still doing media interviews. Perhaps Erhlich at least inspired a famous 1973 movie (Edward G. Robinson’s last one), even though its predictions proved wildly false. But I’m not counting out Soylent Green as a forthcoming progressive proposal, perhaps from Canada with its out-of-control “assisted death” movement, including a debate over whether to offer it to the mentally ill - broadly defined to apparently include anti-vaxxers and the homeless. After all, people can already compost themselves. Why stop there?

The latest prognostications dealt with recent wildfires in California last year and again this Spring in Canada, where alarmists took great pleasure in documenting the haze that enveloped New York City, Washington, and other east coast environments. You’ve no doubt seen the pictures.

However, the facts suggest something different. From Marc Morano of Climate Depot:

According to Canada’s Department of Natural Resources, fires have been occurring for thousands of years in the boreal forests of eastern Canada – not exactly unprecedented. In addition, they call fire a primary change agent that is as crucial to forest renewal as the sun and rain -perhaps not a calamity either.

It appears that 2023 is on pace to be a year with unusually high numbers of fires. Yet the previous year was one of historically low numbers. The Canadian National Fire Database (2023) provides facts to dispute the idea of climate change-driven increases in fires in Canadian fires. According the CNFD, there has been a significant and continuing decline in the number of fires and no discernible trend in the area burned.

And last year’s destructive fires in California. This is the face of the “climate change” we were told fueled at least them.

Climate alarmism doesn’t have to prove correct to serve as a lucrative business with generous government subsidies and tax credits. And oddly, many of the prescriptions they impose upon us, from electric cars to windmills, solar panels, and plant-based meats, seem to come with costs and consequences we rarely hear about.

Consuming insects is another matter, but more about that later. Let’s take a look at the largest of these prescriptions.

Electric Vehicles

Since the climate cult loves to feature children and Hollywood stars, let’s turn to Rowan Atkinson of “Mr. Bean” fame. You may know him as a famous British comedian and actor, but he has a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, with a subsequent master’s degree in Control Systems. Here’s what he wrote for The Guardian, a UK-based publication.

I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

Oops.

As you may know, the (UK) government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be largely based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they are estimated to last only upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

It can take a decade or longer for an EV's “carbon footprint” to fall lower than a fossil-fuel-powered vehicle. But by that point, the batteries will likely need to be replaced at no small fee. And heavier cars do more damage to highways and bridges while paying no fuel taxes, which are used to maintain them. Ideas are floating around to address that, but they’re controversial, from a tax to charge EVs to a per-mile user fee based on how many miles you drive. The controversial part, of course, is how to track mileage without raising privacy concerns.

And never mind the environmental and geopolitical issues of mining for lithium and other minerals to make those batteries.

For the record, I think electric cars are cool. I love riding in a Tesla with all its features, especially the expansive sunroof. But my next car is more likely to be a hybrid, even though they have batteries, too. And you will be punished if you’re an auto manufacturer not on the EV train. Just ask Toyota’s CEO, Akio Toyoda, whose company gave us the first successful hybrid vehicle, the Prius.

“It wasn’t long ago that Toyota’s hybrid vehicles were all the rage with the climate-change left. Now progressive investors and government pension funds are targeting the Prius manufacturer in a proxy campaign because it has questioned the climate lobby’s electric-vehicle orthodoxy,” reported the Wall Street Journal.

Lest you think I’m a “climate denier,” allow me to align myself with Dr. Lomborg, who runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center and told Hillsdale University this: “I will . . . concede that global warming is real, to some large extent manmade, and a serious problem.” While the data is sketchy, global temperatures are up about a degree since the end of the “Little Ice Age” around our Civil War in the 1860s. There’s plenty of evidence of melting from glaciers from Greenland to the Himalayas. The question is, how do we mitigate it? And don’t forget the benefits of “global warming.” Except, perhaps, in northern Alberta on the first day of summer.

Lomborg, again:

“. . . when it comes to climate change, our focus should not be on the policies that cost a lot, deliver little, and in the end likely don’t even work. Rather, we should focus our efforts on developing new technology and encouraging innovation that will lead to the production of affordable and dependable green energy.” This includes safe and clean nuclear energy and hydrogen. And without the hysteria.

The auto industry made a big mistake kowtowing to environmentalists and wrong-headed policymakers by segueing to electric instead of hydrogen vehicles. I know of at least one instance where hydrogen fuel cells have successfully powered a large bakery north of Hartford, Connecticut, for nearly 20 years, including returning energy to the grid.

In Part Two, I will discuss the issues with Solar Panels, Wind Power, and Plant Based meats and whether eating insects is a viable climate solution.