The Insurance Policy
The linked article, explaining that battery-powered airplanes are currently implausible, uses the statement, “what is physically possible is not what is economically prudent.” I have used this line many times when talking with people about their suggestions relating to climate change mitigation. These are the people that say we should do all we can just in case climate change is real - the JIC hypothesis. The idea is akin to a useless insurance policy at an absolutely prohibitive cost.
According to Jeff Currie the Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division of Goldman Sachs, 10 years ago we used 82% of fossil fuels for energy, and it now sits at 81%. So just imagine after having spent trillions and trillions of dollars in the deceptive game of climate change mitigation, we’ve reduced fossil-fuel usage by a mere 1%.
The graph below shows usages from various energy types from 1908 on, and as the explanation delineates it has changed very little:
In 2020, California had its most fierce wild season in a century. According to a study by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Chicago (UC), the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by the fires neutralized 18 years of California’s deep-seated and gratuitous green energy programs. While the short-sighted progressive politicians blame all wildfires on climate change, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) articulated that climate change is not a participant. Excess fuels are constantly being created because of anti-logging legislation, a deficiency of prescribed burns, elimination of fire breaks and berms, and no forest floor clearing and cleaning.
The graph below shows the decline in timber harvesting in California from 1955 to 2016 and it has been further reduced from there.
So in California, all of their crazy and unwarranted climate change programs prove to be a simple waste of time and taxpayer funds. Furthermore, quite often in the west, the investigation into a cause for wildfires is concluded in a set of handcuffs.
A colossal cost in the deceit of climate change mitigation is the “social cost of carbon (SCC)” concept and perhaps the largest, single, and dishonest insurance policy. It is added and entrenched in governmental policy, legislation, and regulation. The SCC is intentionally misnamed since proponent politicians and economists do not want to use the accurate and cleaner term “carbon dioxide”.
Calculating the SCC requires estimating the impacts of climate change. Therein is the colossal problem - best estimates of the SCC come from “Integrated Assessment Models”. Models that are injected with the mendacities of accelerating storms of every type with greater intensities Also embedded are false accusations of increases in droughts, floods, and wildfires and the ocean’s rise which has not fluctuated since the conclusion of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the mid-1800s. In this matter, all the climate proponents have left are temperatures, yet in a survey published in July, an astounding 96% of American surface weather stations were found substandard. As Anthony Watts, director of this study and one in 2007, states, “With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.”
I would certainly like to see a similar survey of surface weather stations around the world.
As inflation continues to spiral, as prices of gas and other commodities as well as the fundamental needs of the average citizen skyrocket, politicians and parliamentarians turn an unsympathetic, blind eye on its citizenry and continue to hustle climate change as the world’s existential threat when in reality, it is them.