A Particularly Lunatic Week for Climate Alarmism

The Climate Industrial Complex (CIC) cannot be accused of thinking small. At the state level, the approval of California bill SB52 by both houses of the state legislature means carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions must be lowered to levels 40% below levels measured in 1990. This is expected to necessitate the development of massive numbers of new regulations and policies that will allow the state government to control and dictate virtually every aspect of Californians’ lives in the opinion of one observer, including:

where and how they can live,
what kind of jobs and businesses they can work in,
what kind of housing they can have,
what kind of car they can drive (if any),
how many miles can they drive,
what kind of public transportation they must use,
how many times they must walk and bicycle,
how much and what kind of energy they can use,
what kind and how food can be farmed.

Bonn Talks on Losses and Damages

Meanwhile at the “intersessional” international climate talks in Bonn, Germany, over the last two weeks a discussion was held on the issue of losses and damages from climate change. One of the more unusual aspects of the discussion was that it included a proposal that up to $300 billion in phantom additional funds be disbursed by non-government groups rather than governments. How accountability might be maintained by groups with little experience or incentives to carefully handle such vast funds was not made clear.

All This Is Dwarfed by a New Gore Proposal

Finally an organization which appears to be affiliated with Al Gore proposed that $750 billion per year more should be spent on additional “investments” in renewables and other low-carbon technologies ($300 billion per year) and more efficient energy saving equipment and buildings ($450 billion per year).

So these two prominent climate alarmist groups within the CIC want up to a mere $1 trillion more per year to “solve” the “climate change” problem and to help people who lose their land and culture or are forced to migrate as a result of climate-related problems countries for their alleged “losses and damages” from climate change.

Although it is far from clear, it appears this is in addition to the $1.5 trillion per year estimated to have been spent in recent years on climate-related expenditures such as windmills. So the proposal is to increase expenditures on climate alarmism by over 60 percent even though the justification for spending anything has decreased greatly over the last year. And unless taxes are greatly increased in the developed countries, these vast sums must either be borrowed as sovereign debt or funds must be shifted that will decrease the welfare of people in the developed world so as to divert the added funds to satisfy the alarmists.

Given recent research showing that carbon dioxide emissions have no significant effect on global warming/climate change, a total of $2.5 trillion seems a mite expensive for doing something that will have no significant effects on the alleged danger posed by climate change. Last week I also explained why the UN climate models are worthless so that even if the UN had managed to correctly assess the effects of increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) on global temperatures, the conclusions from the models would still prove nothing.

The CIC’s vilification of CO₂ (one of the bases for all plant life and therefore animal life as well) has no basis in science, which suggests that the more CO₂ that we can get into the atmosphere the better off humans and the environment will be. The vilification is just part of the CIC’s narrative designed to promote their cult ideology. Despite their setback as a result of the 2016 US election, the CIC has by no means given up its dreams of siphoning off much of the funds now used to meet human needs while leaving humans and the environment worse off.

The Dubious Effectiveness of Catering to the CIC’s Demands

Since the alarmists’ alleged “scientific” justification, which has long been dubious at best, has collapsed even further in the last year, the alarmists are mainly left with handwaving and “denier” insults. The whole enterprise reminds me of donations to non-profit groups in the US. If a potential contributor makes a $10 contribution this year, the groups will send a request for $100 next year. But if you contribute nothing this year or in previous years, they will propose a $10 contribution this year or even send their fundraising letter to someone else. Clearly the best approach if you want to avoid being hassled is never to make a contribution in the first place. Contributions are not effective in buying off the alarmists; you are just inviting ever escalating demands in future years–all for nothing in the case of the CIC.

Obviously, there is no upper limit to the CIC’s potential demands since there is no expenditure or concessation that will achieve the stated goal (an alleged end to climate change). A number of countries, mainly in Western Europe, have attempted to cater to some of the CIC’s demands, and now California is going ever deeper into the deep end. But since the alleged goal cannot be achieved by reducing human-caused CO₂ emissions, there is no amount or concessation that can ever be said to achieve a goal that humans currently have no means to achieve or even measure. But that is unlikely to change the CIC’s behavior.

It would seem far better not to get started catering to the CIC’s demands and to end any support where some of their demands have already been met. They will only want much more next year for their insatiable cult ideology. Even if their unproven claims of actually reducing CO₂ emissions were true, it has proved impossible to determine the effects of reducing CO₂ emissions on atmospheric levels of CO₂, and it now appears that there are no effects of changes in atmospheric CO₂ on global temperatures.

Yet despite this record of an ever more lunatic approach by the climate alarmist movement, there are still members of the Trump Administration who want to preserve the US role in the Paris non-treaty “treaty.” A better approach would be simply to just say no to the whole nonsense. We are dealing with a climate alarmist movement that has lost all moorings to the real world. This would be an ideal time to back out of the “treaty” before really serious damage is done to the US economy by continued pursuit of climate alarmism.