Left-Liberal Energy Agitprop
Many societies, including the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and China, are running short of the energy supplies needed to meet national demands. Fuel costs are soaring.
China is not, but, in western nations, left-liberal politicians are discouraging fossil fuel exploration, production and transportation to satisfy the demands of climate alarmists who vastly overestimate the ability of wind and solar to replace them, as well as the effects of “climate change.”
The left’s goal is to create an artificial scarcity of conventional energy, and to subsidize alternative fuel producers.
“If you restrict the supply (of fossil fuels), you alter the market and…create a better environment for more sustainable fuels.” – New York University professor Max Sarinsky.
Accordingly, left-liberal government central planners are kneecapping plentiful, efficient carbon-based energy sources in favor of inferior alternatives, even though “climate” fears are overblown.
For example, with uncommonly cool and wet 2021 weather, parts of Europe missed a “normal” summer. Rather than “one-day freak weather events,” Austria’s August snowfalls appear to mark the beginning of a cooling cycle.
For years, left-wing “environmentalists” have lectured that Antarctica is shrinking due to human carbon dioxide emissions “overheating the planet,” when, in fact, its ice pack is expanding. The Japan Meteorological Agency reports that Antarctica’s annual maximum sea ice has grown for three consecutive years.
Contrary to alarmists’ claims, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is growing, too. In 150 years, there has been no change in sea surface temperatures there.
The geological record reveals that, 14,500 years ago, sea levels along Western Canada were almost 300 feet higher than today, about 30 feet higher 1,800 years ago.
Environmental Protection Agency/National Hurricane Center data “show hurricanes became neither more numerous or more powerful during the past half-century of modest warming.”
Statistically, far more people die from cold than hot weather.
Nonetheless, alarmists conducted a barely noticed global “climate strike” in September during which protesters demanded “intersectional climate justice” (whatever that is…).
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has created an office that treats climate change as a “public-health issue,” and Washington Democrats have embedded massive spending on “climate” projects in a stalled $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill designed primarily to empty taxpayers’ wallets.
Interestingly, environmental activists also say they don’t like mining.
But Power Line contributor John Hinderaker points out that just “meeting [only!] current U.S. electricity needs with wind and solar would require a 50% increase in global copper production, a tripling of global nickel production, and a 2,150% increase in global cobalt production.”
“This would be the largest mining and manufacturing project in world history, and even if…sufficient supplies of those minerals exist somewhere, the vast increase in demand would send prices through the roof.
“If we adopt electric vehicles and otherwise try to electrify our economy, these numbers skyrocket, so that…global copper production would have to triple and cobalt production would have to increase by 8,200%.”
Millions of square miles of often-unreliable windmills and solar panels would be needed to meet America’s current energy demands, so, to implement the “Green New Deal” objective of full reliance on alternative energy sources in ten years, America will have to scrap environmental impact studies that currently take years to prepare, approve and, often, litigate. In order to approve wind and solar projects quickly, federal, state and local environmental statutes, permitting procedures and land use plans, the Clean Water Act’s wetlands regulations, and habitat protections in the Endangered Species Act must be eliminated.
Clearly, climatistas don’t genuinely care about the environment – or wildlife.
Facing a lack of or conflicting empirical evidence, discredited climate models and a garmentless climate hierocracy, “global warming” evolved into “climate change” over two-plus decades, more recently “weather disruption.”
The environmental left’s solutions to all these frequently contradictory “crises” are to raise taxes, grow government, hamstring capitalism and relinquish national sovereignty.
Not coincidentally, those are the same policies the left always pursues, even in the absence of “urgent, time-critical” global environmental “catastrophes.”
Perceptive skeptics view climate alarmism merely as left-wing agitprop, another temporary pretense to achieve other liberal – socialist – policy goals.
But, Chicken Little is always among us. If the sky isn’t falling, and the last ice age didn’t destroy us, then something else will.
So, when motives are in doubt, look for the financial and/or political interests.
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2021/10/11/jerry-shenk-left-liberal-energy-agitprop/
