Climate alarmists have gone to endless efforts to gain public acceptance of their doomsday premise that the world must greatly reduce its use of fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. They have fudged the surface temperature data, used meaningless climate models, argued that human emissions of carbon dioxide will warm the planet despite the strong evidence to the contrary, and so on, but their greatest perversion is of the English language.
They have branded CO2 as a pollutant and claimed that reducing it is necessary to make the world “clean.” All the alarmists from Gore to McKibben to Obama are guilty of this; in fact, the use of this terminology is so uniform that one suspects that they all have been coached to say it at every opportunity. Unfortunately, their efforts have even been supported by the Supreme Court, which decreed that CO2 is subject to regulation by the USEPA under the Clean Air Act despite no real support for this in the legislative history.
The Alarmists’ Biggest Propaganda Weapon
Since no one is opposed to something being clean, this is by far the alarmists’ biggest propaganda weapon. They have eagerly seized it and are running with it as hard as they can, despite its inapplicability in this case. They often combine it with the additional adjective “renewable” and refer to wind and solar-generated energy as “clean renewable” energy. CO2 emissions from using fossil fuels to generate energy, on the other hand, are characterized as “dirty” even though they are invisible, so cannot be perceived as clean or dirty by anyone.
But how can they get by with such a gross perversion of reality and the language? Plants must have adequate levels of CO2 in order to live, and have been shown to grow better with higher atmospheric levels; if they all die, Earth will become a truly dirty, lifeless landscape with endless piles of blowing sand and dirt and starving humans. Plants came close to mass starvation during the last ice age because of the low levels of CO2. CO2 is essential for plants and indirectly for animals.
Why Wind and Solar Are Actually Very Dirty
So the alarmists are actually arguing that life on Earth should be dirty and plants must be allowed to die in order to keep life-giving atmospheric CO2 levels down. The alarmists’ favored means for reducing CO2 emissions actually have many important dirty aspects such as bird and bat kills, rare earth mining, hideous wind and solar plants spread over huge areas, and difficult and slow removal of abandoned windmills and solar facilities after the subsidies are cut. This does not make CO2 reduction “clean”; it makes it anti-environmental, anti-poor people, and ultimately “dirty.” But there is no rational basis that anti-environmentalist actions are “clean.” As Matt Ridley has recently observed:
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fiberglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.
The time has come for climate skeptics to actively claim their rightful ownership of the word “clean” when discussing climate rather than allowing climate alarmists to do so.
The United Nations General Assembly is dominated by anti-American – Anti-Western politicians/bureaucrats that hate the West who they claim are responsible for their country’s impoverishment. They established the intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC to spread the word about global warming and sea level rise. There are aim is to put Westerners on a guilt trip and to extort money from them. Their ultimate aim is to gain sovereignty over the United States and western countries in order to redistribute income in their favor. The truth is they are responsible for their own improvrishment due largely to faulty political institutions. I think Trump has a good handle on this situation which is the main reason he withdrew from the Paris Accord.
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[…] Informationskälla till det här inlägget är främst kapitlet One Fibre Can Kill: The Great Asbestos Scam i Scared to Death – from BSE to Global Warming Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth av Ch. Booker & R. North och i viss mån även den informativa asbestguiden: http://www.lr.org/en/_images/229-77031_AsbestosGuide2013_tcm155-247011.pdf Alan Carlin publicerade nyligen en tänkvärd liten betraktelse över begreppet ren i samband med luft och energi: http://www.carlineconomics.com/archives/3740 […]
Great article. This shows the hopeless case for climate alarmists who have to change carbon dioxide to carbon pollution and global warming to climate change. These people are lairs and should be called the name.
Sorry to post so frequently, but climate is a sweeping topic. Doc carlin wrote about the semantic connotation of clean and whether this is reasonable. He suggests people are being misinformed by the benign word, clean. This would be a psychological tactic to misinform. This regrettably is par for the course within politics and advertising on any topic.
Another psychological tactic is to exploit the yearning within many nice people for altruism, peace, and supporting a claimed noble cause.
The noble cause is saving the planet via collaborating with all the other nations and sacrificing some CO2. This is akin to a religious appeal and faith. Naturally the Pope likes the sound of this.
Many welcome a healthier earth and collaboration within a contentious world. Climate change is unfortunately a belief that is utterly false and absurd. The salient point is there are many religions in human history. There is a widespread human appetite for worthy causes and faiths.
Al Gore has much in common with proselytizing inventors of other religions, across thousands of years of recorded history. He has added to his religious faith that it has been definitively proven by 97 percent of ethically pristine environmental scientists.
This myth is then rubber stamped by the Fake News media. This can rope a dope Stephen Hawking and even some deplorables who ought to know better.
Alan
Another insightful article.
Do you know if a class action suit could be brought to require a review or repeal of the endangerment finding? If I remember correctly you provided information about the lack of evidence and improper methodology the EPA used in their process of getting it in force. Now with Wallace et all and many new science papers refuting the models its likely that it couldn’t stand a thorough review. The very existence of the finding is the cause of most of the costly regulations from the Obama EPA that Trump is working to roll back. In my opinion if it does not get reviewed and amended or repealed it can and probably will be the basis of future regulations. The fact that it stands on invalid arguments will not be considered if it is used as grounds for legislation or rule making.
Comments by Alan Carlin: I agree with everything you say in this comment. Yes, my understanding is that suits can be brought against USEPA by those harmed directly or indirectly by the Endangerment Finding to compel EPA to reconsider it if EPA does not act on petitions they have filed requesting such a reconsideration. I currently know of three such petitions, some of which have been discussed previously in this blog. To date EPA has not responded to any of the three petitions. If such lawsuits should be filed, the losing side could appeal the decision, so they might require some time and money. EPA can and in my view should open a reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding without further delay since the bases for the current finding have been shown to be invalid, which has also been discussed in this blog.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/29/toxic-waste-from-solar-panels-300-times-that-of-nuclear-power/
Some surprising polling data. Even counties carried by Trumo prefer remaining in the Paris climate accord.
This may imply trade and immigration and the economy matter more for trumo voters. Many may not appreciate the economic harms of the climate agreement. it is fortunate trump and Pruitt showed leadership.
No CO2, no photosynthesis, then no oxygen. What is so wonderful about asphyxiation? Before plants, the earth had very little oxygen in its atmosphere.
Claimed clean solar and wind can Injure the environment, plus ruin economies. But They can be useful in niche situations.
The strongest line of attack may be economic impoverishment, justified on laughably fake science dreamt up by wackos.