The Biden administration wants America to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve "net-zero" by 2050. Other advanced nations have similar goals. They all need a bucket of cold water in the face. The New York Times Company is as unlikely a source of that icy bucket as you can imagine. Call it Climate Alarmism Central. But last month, it dashed that bucket of cold water in the face of millions of climate alarmists. In New York Times Magazine it published an interview with … [Read more...]
Biden and Europe Should Respond to Russian Aggression by Scrapping Extremist Climate Policies
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was facilitated by alarmist policies enacted by the United States and Europe, meant to combat alleged runaway global warming. Germany, for example, decided to abandon coal and nuclear energy in favor of supposed climate-friendly “renewable” energy sources. And in the United Kingdom, after briefly considering allowing fracking a few years back, the government has basically doubled down on wind and solar, erecting bans or nearly insurmountable hurdles to natural … [Read more...]
Pope’s climate policies would hurt the ones he loves
The Mills Brothers — and dozens of others — sang “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Somebody tell the pope it doesn’t have to be that way with sensible energy policy. On June 14th, Pope Francis met with the executives of multi-national energy companies to promote schemes to mitigate what he says are the catastrophic effects of man-made global warming. Speaking to CEOs of Occidental Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum and ConocoPhillips at the Vatican, the … [Read more...]
How to Prevent Climate Change? Prevent Births!
For 218 years---since Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population---people have been coming up with new rationales for limiting or even reducing human population. For Malthus, the fundamental reason is that people ate too much, so increasing their numbers would lead to starvation as farmers' ability to raise enough food fell behind a mushrooming population. Others since then have expanded his argument to all kinds of other resources---forests, … [Read more...]
What’s the Real Motive Behind German Green Party’s Plan to Ban Petrol-driven Vehicles?
Der Spiegel reports (partial English translation here, courtesy of the Global Warming Policy Foundation) that the German Green Party has announced that it intends to get petrol-driven (gasoline and diesel) vehicles off German roads, aiming to have no more such vehicles registered from 2036 onward. "'We Greens want to get away from oil on the road over the next 20 years. We want to give cities, cyclists and pedestrians enough room that is free of toxic emissions,' it says in the draft of their … [Read more...]
Georgetown University Climate Symposium Includes Prominent Neopagan Speaker
Wish I’d heard of Georgetown University Berkley Center’s “Symposium on Religion and Climate Change“ earlier. Perhaps Cornwall Alliance could have had someone there to offer a contrasting perspective---something most meetings seem rather loathe to entertain. Alas, I only learned of it about an hour before it was to begin. Aside from the usual problem of such conferences having scientific blinders on, assiduously avoiding the need to interact with the serious scientific objections to climate … [Read more...]
Immorality Pretending to Virtue
Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues characterized by a claim for which there is no evidence … [and which is] characterized by profound immorality pretending to virtue. Climate Scientist Richard Lindzen At the end of 2015, government leaders will once again gather, this time in Paris, to craft a global treaty that will commit governments to significantly reducing modern civilization’s dependence on fossil-fuel based energy. Billed as an effort to “save the planet” from the scourge of … [Read more...]
Bill Gates Gets It on Wind and Solar
In an interview published in The Atlantic, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates had two very astute observations about wind and solar energy: On the limits of wind power and solar photovoltaic cells: Wind has grown super-fast, on a very subsidized basis. Solar, off a smaller base, has been growing even faster—again on a highly subsidized basis. But it’s absolutely fair to say that even the modest R&D that’s been done, and the various deployment incentives that are there, have worked … [Read more...]
Green Climate Fund Gets a Slow Start
The $100 billion slush fund---er, Green Climate Fund---created at the COP17 climate summit in Durban, South Africa, is supposed to redistribute money from wealthy developed countries to poor developing countries (or at least to the thugs who run them). Call it a kind of penalty for the developed countries' having overcome poverty before the developing ones, raising atmospheric CO2 concentration along the way, igniting sudden and catastrophic global warming (absent for the last 18 years and 8 … [Read more...]
“The Pause” Remains 18 Years 8 Months Despite Strong El Niño
Each month when RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) updates its global average temperature data, Lord Christopher Monckton calculates how far back one can go in the RSS record without showing a positive trend, i.e., how long "the pause" is. It's been lengthening for several years and as of the end of August had reached 18 years and 8 months. Now, with a strong El Niño developing in the Pacific, the calculation yields a new starting point---not January of 1997 but February. We might say we've hit a … [Read more...]