July 2, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 3 – “Climate Change” – has three sections: First, which is seldom done, is an analysis of the Climate Science supporting the Climate Change movement. In the attached PDF you will find a conclusion to the literary debate on climate change I conducted in 2018. Additionally, it contains excerpts from the best and fairest analysis I have found on Climate Science from Unsettled written by Steven Koonin. The follow-on text below only contains the latter.
Second, the middle section contains different viewpoints on the Democrat Party’s climate change policy initiatives enacted plus a World View which includes the Paris Agreement.
The last section is focused on potential negative consequences in the pursuit of net-zero emissions.
Following the precedent of the last segment I have rated my concern going forward for Climate Change policies as “Some Concern”. As I have stated previously, I am a climate change skeptic based on the lack of support via climate science for the movement, so my rating is biased in that direction. My reasoning for the rating is based on the following:
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 3 – “Climate Change” – has three sections: First, which is seldom done, is an analysis of the Climate Science supporting the Climate Change movement. In the attached PDF you will find a conclusion to the literary debate on climate change I conducted in 2018. Additionally, it contains excerpts from the best and fairest analysis I have found on Climate Science from Unsettled written by Steven Koonin. The follow-on text below only contains the latter.
Second, the middle section contains different viewpoints on the Democrat Party’s climate change policy initiatives enacted plus a World View which includes the Paris Agreement.
The last section is focused on potential negative consequences in the pursuit of net-zero emissions.
Following the precedent of the last segment I have rated my concern going forward for Climate Change policies as “Some Concern”. As I have stated previously, I am a climate change skeptic based on the lack of support via climate science for the movement, so my rating is biased in that direction. My reasoning for the rating is based on the following:
- I am not concerned about increases in sea levels, violent storms, or other climate catastrophes caused by increased man induced greenhouse gas emissions because the causality is most likely there certainly to the degree being reported.
- I am concerned going forward on misspent climate change moneys to address the above as well as hurtful policies enacted by the same misguided presumptions. The consequence of either is significant, but not severe, hence the rating of “Some Concern.”
Harley
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 3
CLIMATE CHANGE – EXCERPTS
CLIMATE SCIENCE: Background: I am a scientist – I work to understand the world through measurements and observations and then communicate them clearly. I spent about a decade turning those methods to the subject of climate and its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist for the oil company BP and then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administrations Department of Energy. Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding the progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. I am increasingly dismayed at the public discussion of climate and energy. Climate alarmism has come to dominate United States politics, especially among Democrats, where I have otherwise long felt most comfortable politically.
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw each candidate trying to outdo the other with over-the-top statements about “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” increasingly divorced from science. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration has made climate and energy a major priority with the appointment of former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy and proposed spending of almost two trillion dollars to fight this “existential threat to humanity.” Trillion-dollar decisions about reducing human influences on the climate are, in the end, about values, risk tolerance, intergenerational and geographical equities and a balance among economic development, environmental impact, and energy cost, availability and reliability. But they must be informed by an accurate understanding of scientific certainties and uncertainties. Much of the public portrayal of climate science suffers from an effort to persuade rather than inform. Based on my familiarity with assessment reports and literature I would offer this statement.
CLIMATE CHANGE – EXCERPTS
CLIMATE SCIENCE: Background: I am a scientist – I work to understand the world through measurements and observations and then communicate them clearly. I spent about a decade turning those methods to the subject of climate and its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist for the oil company BP and then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administrations Department of Energy. Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding the progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. I am increasingly dismayed at the public discussion of climate and energy. Climate alarmism has come to dominate United States politics, especially among Democrats, where I have otherwise long felt most comfortable politically.
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw each candidate trying to outdo the other with over-the-top statements about “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” increasingly divorced from science. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration has made climate and energy a major priority with the appointment of former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy and proposed spending of almost two trillion dollars to fight this “existential threat to humanity.” Trillion-dollar decisions about reducing human influences on the climate are, in the end, about values, risk tolerance, intergenerational and geographical equities and a balance among economic development, environmental impact, and energy cost, availability and reliability. But they must be informed by an accurate understanding of scientific certainties and uncertainties. Much of the public portrayal of climate science suffers from an effort to persuade rather than inform. Based on my familiarity with assessment reports and literature I would offer this statement.
The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Scenarios: Because of the great uncertainties about the decades to come, instead of making precise predictions of future concentrations, the IPCC created a set of scenarios. These scenarios are not meant to be predictions, but rather are schematic descriptions of distinct, but plausible future worlds. Computer modeling is central to climate science. The models help us understand how the climate system works, why it has changed in the past, and – most importantly – how it might change in the future. These models underpin the reports of the other UN working groups that assess the impacts of a changing climate on ecosystems and society. So how good are our climate models?
Some people are seduced by the notion that we can just feed the present state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences and so accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy, as you might infer from weather forecasts, which can be accurate only out to two weeks or so. So, no matter how precisely we might specify current conditions, the uncertainty in our predictions grows exponentially as they extend into the future. More computer power cannot overcome this basic uncertainty.
Since the model results generally don’t much look like the climate system we observe, modelers then adjust (“tune”) these parameters to get a better match with some features of the real climate system. Although “tuning” sounds like a minor detail as in “fine tuning” there isn’t anything “fine” or minor about it. It’s the process of adjusting the model to deal with troublesome inconsistencies or paper over some irksome uncertainties. And sometimes modelers are tuning sub-grid parameters in ways that aren’t based on the “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result. Not only does this cast doubt on whether the conclusions of the model can be trusted, it makes it clear that we don’t understand the features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required given the smallness of human influences. An ill-tuned model will be a poor description of the real world, while over-tuning risks cooking the books – that is predetermining the answer. Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021).
VIEWPOINTS: The Democrat Party and Climate Change: There is no better subject to illustrate such a colossal deception in today’s world as “climate change,” which is central to the Democrat Party’s growing authoritarianism over all aspects of American life. Every weather event or natural disaster that causes discomfort, damage, or death is attributed to “climate change,” which in turn is said to require major changes in the quality of life, the capitalist system, a reduction in economic growth and prosperity, increased taxation and regulation, the surrender of national sovereignty to international governing organizations, and/or the significant expanse of domestic government power. Indeed, every household produce, from gas stoves, lightbulbs, and dishwashers to air conditioners, washing machines, automobiles, and anything else that uses energy, is now subject to government control. The reason is that “climate change” is a political and economically driven movement within the American Marxist framework that empowers the Democrat Party.
Many media personalities will not permit legitimate, substantive, intelligent, contrary views to meddle in their ideological agenda, which they share with the Democrat Party and the government. For the Democrat Party, “climate change” is not about science. It is the most lucrative, limitless and successful source of power and control over the individual, the economy and consequently the American lifestyle.
Source: The Democratic Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin (2023)
Biden Policy: By 2019, the U.S. had hit a milestone the country never thought possible: It became a net energy exporter. All it took was a little economic freedom. Then came Biden. Biden is in thrall with the modern incarnation of the environmental movement. To the point he took the strongest energy market America has ever known – and broke it.
Biden inherited one of the strongest energy markets in the country’s history. We were the largest oil and gas producer on the globe. Gas prices were low. Electricity prices were low. Heating costs were low. Biden also inherited a country that was the leader in carbon reductions. The U.S.’s rapid transition into natural gas via the “shale revolution,” had resulted in the largest decease of carbon emissions of any developed nation on the planet.
But something big had changed since Obama. Democrats began to understand the degree to which they could leverage climate hysteria. It became imperative for government to quickly restructure every aspect of American life. Not just energy markets and consumption – everything. That’s convenient if you are in the business of government control. The introduction of the Green New Deal explained that climate change was causing “sea levels to rise, and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, drought, and other extreme weather events that threatened human life.” None of this has been proven by science. It laid out progressive plans to take over most every aspect of American life—in a period of ten years.
The deal called for eliminating most fossil fuels. It would get rid of every “combustion engine” in existence – cars, boats, planes, trucks, but also lawn mowers, weed eaters, generators, all-terrain vehicles, you name it. The Bill called to retrofit every building in the country. The initial talking points also laid out a plan to make America vegan, getting rid of meat production since cow farts increase emissions. Most notable, because this transition would cause upheaval, the talking points explained that government also needed to guarantee every American a job that included a “family sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations and a pension,” while also providing “economic security” to those “unable or unwilling” to work. It also called for free college and trade school for all. Almost as an afterthought – it would also address “the existential challenge of climate change.”
This is how Democrats take a discreet environmental problem and turn it into a mandate to dictate how we live, where we live, what we eat, what we earn, and what we own. Biden oriented his entire government around this priority. Every cabinet head was told to structure their agenda around the climate threat. His first day actions took a wrecking ball to every part of the domestic energy industry, erasing with the stroke of his pen tens of billions in investment and years of dealmaking, from the Keystone XL pipeline to exploration activities on federal lands. Equally damaging was the administration’s work to block fossil fuel companies from pursuing future projects.
Only a decade ago, the global oil and gas industry was looking to replicate America’s shale revolution in Europe, which has plenty of its own shale fields. But mass protests against fracking cowed Europe’s politicians, and the continent’s gas production has plunged by half over the past ten years. At the same time, lefty European leaders began aggressively subsidizing renewable energy and shutting down their coal plants to satisfy their commitments under the UN climate accords. Yet it is a well- known fact that wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Countries still need fossil fuels to fill the gap. This came home hard in the summer and fall of 2021 as Europeans suddenly found themselves short on wind, shorter on fossil fuels, and facing a full-blown energy crisis.
As Europe shut down its own fossil production, it dramatically increased its imports from Russia. Europe offered itself up for extortion, and Putin was happy to oblige. On February 24, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time of Putin’s invasion, U.S. production was a hefty 1.5 million barrels a day below pre-pandemic levels and 15% below a 2019 government forecast. The obvious solution – from both policy and politics perspectives was for Biden to make a speech declaring an end to his war on U.S. production.
Biden instead resorted to blame shifting and gimmicks. He began referring to the run-up in energy prices as “Putin’s price hike.” Only that didn’t explain why prices had been soaring in the U.S. well before February 2022. He accused drillers of “war profiteering” and threatened to resurrect the windfall profits tax. He blasted oil refineries, falsely accusing them of cutting back on production to pad profits. He even tried blaming mom-and-pop gas station owners, tweeting a warning over the July 4 weekend in 2022. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”
The U.S. was confronted with a true emergency. Biden also took to begging. He traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 to ask the kingdom and other OPEC nations, to produce more. And the administration in the fall secretly pleaded with Saudi Arabia to convince OPEC to delay a planned cut in production – until after the midterm election. No agenda there! His pleas were ignored. It was nonetheless stunning to see the president beg OPEC to save the U.S. from its own misguided decisions. Biden put his climate agenda ahead of U.S. security, safety, and economic well-being.
The worst part of Biden’s climate agenda is that it’s undermining the U.S. economy and global standing – for absolutely no purpose. Even the most radical U.S. reductions won’t make a whit of difference to global temperatures. India, Africa, and China continue to ramp up emissions in their quest to become developed countries. Scientist Bjorn Lomborg ran the numbers on what would happen to global temperatures if every signatory to the Paris climate accords fulfilled every one of their commitments by 2030. Total temperature reduction would be 0.048 degrees Celsius by 2100. For this Biden is willing to take away your diesel pickup truck, your lawn mower, and your ability to cook with gas.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023).
The Nuclear Option: One clean technology that has been adopted at a wide level is nuclear power. Even so it seems to rarely get national attention. Nuclear is a clean, abundant energy source that has been readily available for decades. The U.S. wouldn’t have to tap into national reserves to acquire it. It is more dependable than wind and solar which generate power only intermittently. You don’t even need unsightly windmills or solar panels.
Famed researcher Bjorn Lomborg speaks positively about nuclear, noting that “it is currently the only way to deliver 24/7, salable, near-CO2-free power. Nuclear is also one of the safest electricity technologies per kWh produced.” The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. The U.S. got 19% of our total electrical output in 2019 from nuclear. We have maintained roughly the same level of operable nuclear power capacity for the last 35 years. Yet despite his lavish spending on pretty much everything else. The allocated $6 billion that will be distributed over 13 years to nuclear endeavors is significant underfunding.
Wind and solar have received respectively 17 times and 75 times more subsidies per unit of electricity than the average for oil, gas, coal, and nuclear between 2010 and 2019. Only two new nuclear reactors, both at a single plant in Georgia were under construction at the time this book was drafted. The green movement’s failure to support nuclear exposes their true motives, but their man in the White House is absolutely willing to play along.
Source: Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow (2023).
A WORLD-WIDE VIEW: The Paris Agreement: The Paris Agreement imposes crippling economic demands on the United States – while China, an enormously wealthy and technologically advanced nation, gets a free pass to spew increasingly volumes of pollution for the next decade. If climate change is as urgent a threat as environmentalist claim, shouldn’t China do its fair share to save the planet? Just as China has repeatedly lied about the COVID-19 plague it unleashed on the world it is lying about its carbon emissions. China’s leaders have no regard for the truth – or for international agreements. China signed the Paris agreement because it serves China to do so. Our leaders signed it even though it harms our interests and aids our adversaries. Each nation is on the honor system in reporting emissions and improvements under the Paris Agreement – these self-reports are called stock takes. There are no enforcements or verification measures for these stock takes. Communist China’s reports are notoriously riddled with errors and lies. Without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress.
Source: Radical Nation by Sean Spicer (2023).
China: On April 22, from the White House, Kerry and Biden convened a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. It included the world’s twenty largest economies and greenhouse gas emitters and forty world leaders, who pledged to make Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that would keep the target of 1.5 degree C within reach. But one country came up conspicuously short. China simply refused from day one to move their NDC. Kerry went on: “When you have a country that represents 30% of the world’s emissions all by itself, that is using more coal than all 38 of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries put together, that is opening more coal plants next year than exist in the United States – when you see that, you have to figure out, how do we stop that?” There could be no real progress without China. Biden needed to show the Chinese president that climate policy was a top U.S. national security priority. Kerry pitched an ambitious proposal: a climate summit between Biden and Xi. “I believe the president of the United States and the president of China are the two people who can help bring that about.” Kerry thought only the president could do it.
China could have done the big thing that the Glasgow conference was looking for – right now, this decade, in a way that will keep alive the hope of holding temperatures to one-point-five C. And China didn’t.
Source: The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple (2023).
POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES: Where is the Money for Climate Change Coming From? The baseline assumption that all climate change goals are justified, no matter the cost, also ends up obscuring the true financial risks involved in implementing environmental goals. A study by McKinsey found that the transition from fossil fuels to a net-zero economy would require an investment of $275 trillion, or about $9.2 trillion per year.
At the end of 2021, Americans had socked away an astronomical $39.4 trillion into retirement funds. It’s enough to pay off the historically high national debt with a few trillion to spare – a trade-off few of us would willingly agree to make. Still, America’s entire retirement fund would only be enough to pay for about 14% of the total cost of reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050, based on a projection from McKinsey.
After a decade in which a jaw-dropping $3.8 trillion was invested in renewable energy projects, fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of total energy use dropped by just 1%. From 82% of total consumption in 2011, fossil fuels were still 81% of the total $3.8 trillion later. No one in America has voted to sacrifice their retirement funds to pay for the New Green Deal agenda. But they’ll be doing it anyway.
Source: The Puppeteers by Jason Chaffetz (2023).
What Happens When It Gets Cold? The “Great Texas Blackout of 2021” took the lives of more than 80 people. Causes ranged from hypothermia to carbon monoxide poisoning to house fires to traffic accidents. Those deaths were caused by political decisions. A decade earlier, federal regulators had explicitly warned Texas that its electric grid would likely fail under extreme cold conditions. That warning went unheeded. Texas conducted an experiment with a limited version of the Green New Deal: 42% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy. But when the storm froze half the state’s wind turbines, that figure dropped to 8%. Texas lacked an adequate infrastructure of coal and nuclear power plants to make up for the sudden shortfall in renewable energy.
When you look at the environmental and energy policies of the Biden-Harris administration it’s clear that Joe Biden refuses to learn the lessons of the Great Texas Blackout of 2021. President Biden and his Democratic allies are dragging the entire nation into a suicide pact with the radical environmental left. I call that suicide pact the “Green Raw Deal.”
Source: Radical Nation by Sean Spicer (2023).
How Climate Change Narrative is Preventing Africa from Modernizing and Prosperity: “We have far bigger problems --- people sleeping hungry, very poor people around me – I’m more worried about that than I’ll ever be worried about climate change. In terms of economic development, energy is the foundational keystone. Not just in terms of the economy and the GDP, but also the household and individual level,” Mr. Machogu of Kenya said.
The new climate colonization is being driven by global entities such as the UN, which says Africa should have energy, but due to climate change, it should focus on wind and solar. “Every solution to Africa’s problems is now centered around climate change,” the UN says to Africa, “If you’re going to end poverty, let’s end it in a way that we don’t impact our climate. If you’re going to have clean water, let’s do it in a way that will not be bad for the climate.”
But Mr. Machogu said modern civilization had “four pillars of civilization” – steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer. Without fossil fuels, we can’t produce these four pillars of civilization. Without fossil fuels, we don't have energy. We must have fossil fuels. It’s how the West beat poverty.” He further said, in layman’s terms, the UN’s policy boils down to “no fossil fuels for Africa,” which necessarily means no economic progress. Conversely, unrestricted access to fossil fuels could help pull Africa out of poverty. “Let me speak for Africa because 60% of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood. We need fossil fuels for farm machinery. Despite the fact that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and all these environmental organizations say solar and wind for Africa, we can’t electrify agriculture – if we did electrify, it would be a tiny percent. Right now, our access to farm machinery is very low. I think about four to five percent of Africans have access, which is very low compared to places like China’s 75%, India’s 45% and the U.S.’s 95%. Almost everything in the U.S. agriculture is done by machines. So having access to farm machinery really would change our lives because it would amplify and expand our capabilities.” In addition to needing fossil fuels for machines and access to loans to purchase them, Mr. Machogu said expanded irrigation, courtesy of fossil fuels, would benefit Africa. “Africa is not all green,” he said. “We have other places that are very dry. So, one of the easiest ways we can end that is by irrigating our land, and we will irrigate our lands using pipes from fossil fuels. We are using 4% of the world’s fertilizer -- only 4%, with 1.4 billion people! It doesn’t make sense to me. So, we need access to fossil fuel fertilizer. That would change our lives in a big, big way.”
“As our policies drive the increased cost of fuel, we are essentially condemning people to have less food harvested and, therefore, less food available to put on the table at higher prices.” Banning natural gas as a fuel would have a ripple effect, he said: fertilizer prices would increase, fertilizer use would decrease, and the food production around the world would decline. Mr. Machogu said that unlike in Western civilizations, if profit from agriculture decreases, African farmers can’t simply look for another line of work. In Kenya, almost 80% of our population is earning a living from agriculture so there is no way we’re going to stop farming. What’s going to happen, and what has happened, is that most people are now getting less production from their farms because of less fertilizer.
“Worldwide, over 80% of energy comes from burning fossil fuels. So, the fact than 1.4 billion Africans are using about 3.9 million barrels of oil per day is so ridiculous compared to the U.S. with its 333 million people burning 20 million barrels of oil per day. I think it boils down to Africa not developing and depopulation. Just that. It’s so simple.”
Source: How Climate Change Narrative is Preventing Africa from Modernizing and Prosperity from the Epoch Times by Katie Spence (April 18, 2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
Some people are seduced by the notion that we can just feed the present state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences and so accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy, as you might infer from weather forecasts, which can be accurate only out to two weeks or so. So, no matter how precisely we might specify current conditions, the uncertainty in our predictions grows exponentially as they extend into the future. More computer power cannot overcome this basic uncertainty.
Since the model results generally don’t much look like the climate system we observe, modelers then adjust (“tune”) these parameters to get a better match with some features of the real climate system. Although “tuning” sounds like a minor detail as in “fine tuning” there isn’t anything “fine” or minor about it. It’s the process of adjusting the model to deal with troublesome inconsistencies or paper over some irksome uncertainties. And sometimes modelers are tuning sub-grid parameters in ways that aren’t based on the “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result. Not only does this cast doubt on whether the conclusions of the model can be trusted, it makes it clear that we don’t understand the features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required given the smallness of human influences. An ill-tuned model will be a poor description of the real world, while over-tuning risks cooking the books – that is predetermining the answer. Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021).
VIEWPOINTS: The Democrat Party and Climate Change: There is no better subject to illustrate such a colossal deception in today’s world as “climate change,” which is central to the Democrat Party’s growing authoritarianism over all aspects of American life. Every weather event or natural disaster that causes discomfort, damage, or death is attributed to “climate change,” which in turn is said to require major changes in the quality of life, the capitalist system, a reduction in economic growth and prosperity, increased taxation and regulation, the surrender of national sovereignty to international governing organizations, and/or the significant expanse of domestic government power. Indeed, every household produce, from gas stoves, lightbulbs, and dishwashers to air conditioners, washing machines, automobiles, and anything else that uses energy, is now subject to government control. The reason is that “climate change” is a political and economically driven movement within the American Marxist framework that empowers the Democrat Party.
Many media personalities will not permit legitimate, substantive, intelligent, contrary views to meddle in their ideological agenda, which they share with the Democrat Party and the government. For the Democrat Party, “climate change” is not about science. It is the most lucrative, limitless and successful source of power and control over the individual, the economy and consequently the American lifestyle.
Source: The Democratic Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin (2023)
Biden Policy: By 2019, the U.S. had hit a milestone the country never thought possible: It became a net energy exporter. All it took was a little economic freedom. Then came Biden. Biden is in thrall with the modern incarnation of the environmental movement. To the point he took the strongest energy market America has ever known – and broke it.
Biden inherited one of the strongest energy markets in the country’s history. We were the largest oil and gas producer on the globe. Gas prices were low. Electricity prices were low. Heating costs were low. Biden also inherited a country that was the leader in carbon reductions. The U.S.’s rapid transition into natural gas via the “shale revolution,” had resulted in the largest decease of carbon emissions of any developed nation on the planet.
But something big had changed since Obama. Democrats began to understand the degree to which they could leverage climate hysteria. It became imperative for government to quickly restructure every aspect of American life. Not just energy markets and consumption – everything. That’s convenient if you are in the business of government control. The introduction of the Green New Deal explained that climate change was causing “sea levels to rise, and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, drought, and other extreme weather events that threatened human life.” None of this has been proven by science. It laid out progressive plans to take over most every aspect of American life—in a period of ten years.
The deal called for eliminating most fossil fuels. It would get rid of every “combustion engine” in existence – cars, boats, planes, trucks, but also lawn mowers, weed eaters, generators, all-terrain vehicles, you name it. The Bill called to retrofit every building in the country. The initial talking points also laid out a plan to make America vegan, getting rid of meat production since cow farts increase emissions. Most notable, because this transition would cause upheaval, the talking points explained that government also needed to guarantee every American a job that included a “family sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations and a pension,” while also providing “economic security” to those “unable or unwilling” to work. It also called for free college and trade school for all. Almost as an afterthought – it would also address “the existential challenge of climate change.”
This is how Democrats take a discreet environmental problem and turn it into a mandate to dictate how we live, where we live, what we eat, what we earn, and what we own. Biden oriented his entire government around this priority. Every cabinet head was told to structure their agenda around the climate threat. His first day actions took a wrecking ball to every part of the domestic energy industry, erasing with the stroke of his pen tens of billions in investment and years of dealmaking, from the Keystone XL pipeline to exploration activities on federal lands. Equally damaging was the administration’s work to block fossil fuel companies from pursuing future projects.
Only a decade ago, the global oil and gas industry was looking to replicate America’s shale revolution in Europe, which has plenty of its own shale fields. But mass protests against fracking cowed Europe’s politicians, and the continent’s gas production has plunged by half over the past ten years. At the same time, lefty European leaders began aggressively subsidizing renewable energy and shutting down their coal plants to satisfy their commitments under the UN climate accords. Yet it is a well- known fact that wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Countries still need fossil fuels to fill the gap. This came home hard in the summer and fall of 2021 as Europeans suddenly found themselves short on wind, shorter on fossil fuels, and facing a full-blown energy crisis.
As Europe shut down its own fossil production, it dramatically increased its imports from Russia. Europe offered itself up for extortion, and Putin was happy to oblige. On February 24, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time of Putin’s invasion, U.S. production was a hefty 1.5 million barrels a day below pre-pandemic levels and 15% below a 2019 government forecast. The obvious solution – from both policy and politics perspectives was for Biden to make a speech declaring an end to his war on U.S. production.
Biden instead resorted to blame shifting and gimmicks. He began referring to the run-up in energy prices as “Putin’s price hike.” Only that didn’t explain why prices had been soaring in the U.S. well before February 2022. He accused drillers of “war profiteering” and threatened to resurrect the windfall profits tax. He blasted oil refineries, falsely accusing them of cutting back on production to pad profits. He even tried blaming mom-and-pop gas station owners, tweeting a warning over the July 4 weekend in 2022. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”
The U.S. was confronted with a true emergency. Biden also took to begging. He traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022 to ask the kingdom and other OPEC nations, to produce more. And the administration in the fall secretly pleaded with Saudi Arabia to convince OPEC to delay a planned cut in production – until after the midterm election. No agenda there! His pleas were ignored. It was nonetheless stunning to see the president beg OPEC to save the U.S. from its own misguided decisions. Biden put his climate agenda ahead of U.S. security, safety, and economic well-being.
The worst part of Biden’s climate agenda is that it’s undermining the U.S. economy and global standing – for absolutely no purpose. Even the most radical U.S. reductions won’t make a whit of difference to global temperatures. India, Africa, and China continue to ramp up emissions in their quest to become developed countries. Scientist Bjorn Lomborg ran the numbers on what would happen to global temperatures if every signatory to the Paris climate accords fulfilled every one of their commitments by 2030. Total temperature reduction would be 0.048 degrees Celsius by 2100. For this Biden is willing to take away your diesel pickup truck, your lawn mower, and your ability to cook with gas.
Source: The Biden Malaise by Kimberley Strassel (2023).
The Nuclear Option: One clean technology that has been adopted at a wide level is nuclear power. Even so it seems to rarely get national attention. Nuclear is a clean, abundant energy source that has been readily available for decades. The U.S. wouldn’t have to tap into national reserves to acquire it. It is more dependable than wind and solar which generate power only intermittently. You don’t even need unsightly windmills or solar panels.
Famed researcher Bjorn Lomborg speaks positively about nuclear, noting that “it is currently the only way to deliver 24/7, salable, near-CO2-free power. Nuclear is also one of the safest electricity technologies per kWh produced.” The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power. The U.S. got 19% of our total electrical output in 2019 from nuclear. We have maintained roughly the same level of operable nuclear power capacity for the last 35 years. Yet despite his lavish spending on pretty much everything else. The allocated $6 billion that will be distributed over 13 years to nuclear endeavors is significant underfunding.
Wind and solar have received respectively 17 times and 75 times more subsidies per unit of electricity than the average for oil, gas, coal, and nuclear between 2010 and 2019. Only two new nuclear reactors, both at a single plant in Georgia were under construction at the time this book was drafted. The green movement’s failure to support nuclear exposes their true motives, but their man in the White House is absolutely willing to play along.
Source: Breaking Biden by Alex Marlow (2023).
A WORLD-WIDE VIEW: The Paris Agreement: The Paris Agreement imposes crippling economic demands on the United States – while China, an enormously wealthy and technologically advanced nation, gets a free pass to spew increasingly volumes of pollution for the next decade. If climate change is as urgent a threat as environmentalist claim, shouldn’t China do its fair share to save the planet? Just as China has repeatedly lied about the COVID-19 plague it unleashed on the world it is lying about its carbon emissions. China’s leaders have no regard for the truth – or for international agreements. China signed the Paris agreement because it serves China to do so. Our leaders signed it even though it harms our interests and aids our adversaries. Each nation is on the honor system in reporting emissions and improvements under the Paris Agreement – these self-reports are called stock takes. There are no enforcements or verification measures for these stock takes. Communist China’s reports are notoriously riddled with errors and lies. Without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress.
Source: Radical Nation by Sean Spicer (2023).
China: On April 22, from the White House, Kerry and Biden convened a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. It included the world’s twenty largest economies and greenhouse gas emitters and forty world leaders, who pledged to make Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that would keep the target of 1.5 degree C within reach. But one country came up conspicuously short. China simply refused from day one to move their NDC. Kerry went on: “When you have a country that represents 30% of the world’s emissions all by itself, that is using more coal than all 38 of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries put together, that is opening more coal plants next year than exist in the United States – when you see that, you have to figure out, how do we stop that?” There could be no real progress without China. Biden needed to show the Chinese president that climate policy was a top U.S. national security priority. Kerry pitched an ambitious proposal: a climate summit between Biden and Xi. “I believe the president of the United States and the president of China are the two people who can help bring that about.” Kerry thought only the president could do it.
China could have done the big thing that the Glasgow conference was looking for – right now, this decade, in a way that will keep alive the hope of holding temperatures to one-point-five C. And China didn’t.
Source: The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple (2023).
POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES: Where is the Money for Climate Change Coming From? The baseline assumption that all climate change goals are justified, no matter the cost, also ends up obscuring the true financial risks involved in implementing environmental goals. A study by McKinsey found that the transition from fossil fuels to a net-zero economy would require an investment of $275 trillion, or about $9.2 trillion per year.
At the end of 2021, Americans had socked away an astronomical $39.4 trillion into retirement funds. It’s enough to pay off the historically high national debt with a few trillion to spare – a trade-off few of us would willingly agree to make. Still, America’s entire retirement fund would only be enough to pay for about 14% of the total cost of reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050, based on a projection from McKinsey.
After a decade in which a jaw-dropping $3.8 trillion was invested in renewable energy projects, fossil fuel consumption as a percentage of total energy use dropped by just 1%. From 82% of total consumption in 2011, fossil fuels were still 81% of the total $3.8 trillion later. No one in America has voted to sacrifice their retirement funds to pay for the New Green Deal agenda. But they’ll be doing it anyway.
Source: The Puppeteers by Jason Chaffetz (2023).
What Happens When It Gets Cold? The “Great Texas Blackout of 2021” took the lives of more than 80 people. Causes ranged from hypothermia to carbon monoxide poisoning to house fires to traffic accidents. Those deaths were caused by political decisions. A decade earlier, federal regulators had explicitly warned Texas that its electric grid would likely fail under extreme cold conditions. That warning went unheeded. Texas conducted an experiment with a limited version of the Green New Deal: 42% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy. But when the storm froze half the state’s wind turbines, that figure dropped to 8%. Texas lacked an adequate infrastructure of coal and nuclear power plants to make up for the sudden shortfall in renewable energy.
When you look at the environmental and energy policies of the Biden-Harris administration it’s clear that Joe Biden refuses to learn the lessons of the Great Texas Blackout of 2021. President Biden and his Democratic allies are dragging the entire nation into a suicide pact with the radical environmental left. I call that suicide pact the “Green Raw Deal.”
Source: Radical Nation by Sean Spicer (2023).
How Climate Change Narrative is Preventing Africa from Modernizing and Prosperity: “We have far bigger problems --- people sleeping hungry, very poor people around me – I’m more worried about that than I’ll ever be worried about climate change. In terms of economic development, energy is the foundational keystone. Not just in terms of the economy and the GDP, but also the household and individual level,” Mr. Machogu of Kenya said.
The new climate colonization is being driven by global entities such as the UN, which says Africa should have energy, but due to climate change, it should focus on wind and solar. “Every solution to Africa’s problems is now centered around climate change,” the UN says to Africa, “If you’re going to end poverty, let’s end it in a way that we don’t impact our climate. If you’re going to have clean water, let’s do it in a way that will not be bad for the climate.”
But Mr. Machogu said modern civilization had “four pillars of civilization” – steel, cement, plastic, and fertilizer. Without fossil fuels, we can’t produce these four pillars of civilization. Without fossil fuels, we don't have energy. We must have fossil fuels. It’s how the West beat poverty.” He further said, in layman’s terms, the UN’s policy boils down to “no fossil fuels for Africa,” which necessarily means no economic progress. Conversely, unrestricted access to fossil fuels could help pull Africa out of poverty. “Let me speak for Africa because 60% of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood. We need fossil fuels for farm machinery. Despite the fact that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and all these environmental organizations say solar and wind for Africa, we can’t electrify agriculture – if we did electrify, it would be a tiny percent. Right now, our access to farm machinery is very low. I think about four to five percent of Africans have access, which is very low compared to places like China’s 75%, India’s 45% and the U.S.’s 95%. Almost everything in the U.S. agriculture is done by machines. So having access to farm machinery really would change our lives because it would amplify and expand our capabilities.” In addition to needing fossil fuels for machines and access to loans to purchase them, Mr. Machogu said expanded irrigation, courtesy of fossil fuels, would benefit Africa. “Africa is not all green,” he said. “We have other places that are very dry. So, one of the easiest ways we can end that is by irrigating our land, and we will irrigate our lands using pipes from fossil fuels. We are using 4% of the world’s fertilizer -- only 4%, with 1.4 billion people! It doesn’t make sense to me. So, we need access to fossil fuel fertilizer. That would change our lives in a big, big way.”
“As our policies drive the increased cost of fuel, we are essentially condemning people to have less food harvested and, therefore, less food available to put on the table at higher prices.” Banning natural gas as a fuel would have a ripple effect, he said: fertilizer prices would increase, fertilizer use would decrease, and the food production around the world would decline. Mr. Machogu said that unlike in Western civilizations, if profit from agriculture decreases, African farmers can’t simply look for another line of work. In Kenya, almost 80% of our population is earning a living from agriculture so there is no way we’re going to stop farming. What’s going to happen, and what has happened, is that most people are now getting less production from their farms because of less fertilizer.
“Worldwide, over 80% of energy comes from burning fossil fuels. So, the fact than 1.4 billion Africans are using about 3.9 million barrels of oil per day is so ridiculous compared to the U.S. with its 333 million people burning 20 million barrels of oil per day. I think it boils down to Africa not developing and depopulation. Just that. It’s so simple.”
Source: How Climate Change Narrative is Preventing Africa from Modernizing and Prosperity from the Epoch Times by Katie Spence (April 18, 2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| country_2l_governance_--_segment_2.pdf |