The Deplorable Truth about Decarbonization

The deplorable truth is that the Climate Industrial Complex (CIC) is pushing exactly in the wrong direction even if what they advocate were free (which is very very far from being the case). The CIC includes the mainstream media, the Democratic Party (which publicly adopted decarbonization last year as part of its Party platform), the Obama Administration, the UN, the “environmentalists,” and a variety of fellow travelers. What currently defines them is a position favoring decarbonization, the removal of some or all human-caused carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the environment.

The CIC, which basically adopted and developed one of the bad ideas put forward by the Limits to Growth book some years ago, wants to decarbonize the world. They have invented a superficially consistent set of scientific rationalizations for this and even created an organ of the UN to define and enforce the CIC’s scientific ideology. In 2015 they cobbled together a non-treaty “Treaty” in Paris to implement their decarbonization worldwide after a previously unsuccessful effort named after Kyoto, the city where it was hatched.

President Trump Has Now Made a Heroic Effort to Withdraw the US from the New “Treaty”

To his great credit, President Trump has announced that he will remove the US from this “Treaty.” His only error was not doing it sooner and more effectively. He has also limited his arguments for doing what needs to be done to economics–decarbonization costs too much, the huge payments to less developed countries for decarbonizing included in the “Treaty” are foolish and useless (even North Korea wants some of the cash), and the “Treaty” puts the US at a competitive disadvantage compared to those countries that are not decarbonizing anytime soon. Obviously, he is correct–it does cost far more than it is worth since decarbonization clearly has negative value and will rob any developed country adopting it of much of their possibility for further economic growth and development. Trumps’ opponents are trying to obscure the monumental costs of the “Treaty,” but if the public understood this, there would be little support for it.

President Trump is apparently not willing to argue the science, which provides equally strong or even stronger arguments. I suspect he did this in order to avoid the swamp that climate science has become as a result of the CIC’s misguided efforts. But swamp it is–and it needs to be called out as such even if it is not politically correct to do so. But I think I understand why he avoided it–it is a politically dangerous area–and he is only willing to expend so much political capital on the climate issue and only as a direct part of his “make America great again” mantra.

The Scientific Case for Carbonization

So let me briefly summarize the scientific case for doing the opposite (carbonization) since President Trump chose not to do so. CO₂ is a basic input for photosynthesis and therefore life itself–not the “dirty” pollutant pictured by the USEPA and the rest of the CIC. Plants will die for lack of enough of it during future ice ages, as many almost did during the last ice age. Earth’s global temperatures have been irregularly declining for many hundreds of millions of years and with it atmospheric CO₂ levels, which are largely determined by temperatures (not human emissions), particularly oceanic temperatures.

If plants have more CO₂, they will grow better and stronger. CO₂ does not have a significant effect on global warming, contrary to the CIC’s basic ideology. Earth needs more of it–in fact as much as we can get in order for plants to have a little added protection from the next ice age–the worst fate we are almost certain to experience sooner or later. The “environmentalists” are not worthy of the name–the desired effect of their activities is not just to ruin the conventional environment (think unsightly and bird killing windmills and solar thermal plants) but threaten the very existence of life on Earth.

In the long run humans may need to try to increase atmospheric CO₂ levels, but the important thing now is at least not to decrease them, as the CIC is trying to do. President Trump has pushed in exactly the right direction and deserves support for his actions–even if they need to be even stronger (like getting the US out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as a whole with only a one year wait rather than the four years he is now pursuing). He only used a few of the many justifications for stopping decarbonization and getting out of the Paris “Treaty,” but he is definitely on the right track and braver than most other politicians to do so.