Quotulatiousness

April 16, 2024

For you, is no autobahn

Filed under: Environment, Germany, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius on the German federal government’s latest brainstorm to achieve their mandated emissions targets:

“Old Autobahn” by en:User:DF08 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

… despite the headlines, they are not going to take away our cars. Amazingly, not even the Greens want to do that. For once the story is not about German authoritarianism, or woke insanity or anything like that. Rather, it’s about how nobody can really bring himself to care about the climate anymore – not even our forward-thinking, progressively minded, environmentally responsible political establishment.

For the backstory, we must go all the way back to the pre-Covid era, when aggressive climate legislation was popular even with centre-right CDU voters, and before the electorate had a taste of what Green policies like the draconian home heating ordinances really feel like on the ground.

Back in those halcyon days, when the child saint Greta Thunberg was cutting class to save the earth, Angela Merkel’s government passed the Climate Protection Act. The law mandates a 65% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, an 88% reduction by 2040, and an utterly unrealisable carbon neutrality by 2045. In the near term, the Climate Protection Act also establishes maximum annual emissions levels for various economic sectors. Should a given sector exceed its maximum, the responsible Ministry must submit an ominous “action programme” to bring things back on target.

The Climate Protection Act is archetypal climate nonsense. Politicians like to take credit for Doing Something about the climate, but because Doing Something amounts to massive economic restrictions and drastic interventions in daily life, they would prefer not to Do that Something themselves. Far better is to pass legislation committing future governments to Do Something and let them deal with the mess. Then you can reap the short-term rewards of being tough on carbon emissions, without bearing direct responsibility for all the chaos that actually being tough on carbon emissions would unleash. Alas, time marches forwards at a steady pace. I am sure that 2030 sounded like an unimaginably distant date when it was floated at the Paris Accords in 2015, but now it is a mere six years away. That is becoming a big, big problem for the climatists.

You could say that Merkel’s Climate Protection Act bequeathed the hapless Scholz government a small collection of ticking time bombs, which they’ve developed a considerable interest in defusing. One way to do this, is to revise the Climate Protection Act and remove its strict sector-based emissions limits before anybody is forced to field a climate-saving “action programme”. In the meantime, they’ve been studiously ignoring the requirements, which is why our Minister of Economic Destruction Robert Habeck could be found complaining back in June that no cabinet ministers were complying with Climate Protection Act emissions limits.

April 12, 2024

When it comes to media coverage of environmental issues “bad news sticks around like honey, while good news dries up like water”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley debunks the attitude — universal among climate activists — that humanity’s mere existence is “bad for the planet”:

A 16 foot high sculpture of a polar bear and cub, afloat on a small iceberg on the River Thames, passes in front of Tower Bridge on 26 January 2009 in London, England.
Spiked

Over the past few years, we have been subject to endless media reports on the devastating impact humanity is having on the global bee population. “Climate change is presenting huge challenges to our bees”, claimed the Irish Times last year. “Where has all the honey gone?”, asked the Guardian earlier this year.

The news from last week may come as a shock to some, then. It turns out that America actually has more bees than ever before, having added a million hives in just five years. The Washington Post, which reported these facts, was certainly surprised given what it calls “two decades of relentless colony-collapse coverage”.

Some of us, however, have been pointing out for more than a decade that the mysterious affliction called “colony collapse disorder”, which caused a blip in honey-bee numbers in the mid-2000s, was always only a temporary phenomenon. Globally, bees are doing better than ever. The trouble is that bad news sticks around like honey, while good news dries up like water.

Honey bees are a domesticated species, so their success depends partly on human incentives. In the case of America, the Texas state government’s decision to reduce property taxes on plots containing bee hives has boosted the popularity of beekeeping. When bees were in trouble, they were seen as a measure of the health of the environment generally. So their recovery can be regarded as a sign of good environmental health.

Why do stories of environmental doom, like this one about collapsing bee colonies, linger in the public consciousness, despite being outdated and wrong? The media are partly to blame. For environmental reporters, bad news is always more enticing than good. It’s more likely to catch the attention of editors and more likely to get clicks from readers. Good news is no news.

So I have a simple rule of thumb to work out when an environmental problem is on the mend: it drops out of the news. (The same is true of countries, by the way. When I was young, Angola and Mozambique were often in the news because they were torn by war; not today, because they are at peace.)

Take whales. In the 1960s, they were the (literal) posterboys of environmental alarm. There were just 5,000 humpback whales in the whole world and they seemed headed for extinction. Today, there are 135,000 humpback whales, which represents a 27-fold increase. For the first time in centuries they sometimes gather in groups of over a hundred. I have even seen them several times myself, which I had assumed as a boy I never would.

Most other whale species are doing almost as well: blue, fin, right, bowhead, sperm, grey, minke – all are increasing steadily in numbers (though certain subpopulations, such as North Atlantic right whales, are still struggling). But the story of whales’ resurgence just doesn’t make the news.

Or take polar bears. Just a few years ago, greens were constantly claiming that they were facing imminent extinction. In 2017, National Geographic published a video of a starving polar bear, with the tagline, “This is what climate change looks like”. It was viewed 2.5 billion times. No climate conference or Greenpeace telly advert was complete without a picture of a sad polar bear on an ice floe. Today, that’s a less common sight, because it is harder and harder to deny that polar bears are less and less rare. Despite heroic efforts by environmentalists to claim otherwise, there is now no hiding the fact that polar-bear numbers have not declined and have probably increased, with some populations having doubled over the past few decades. So much so that some environmentalists and researchers no longer think that polar bears are suitable symbols of man’s threat to the planet.

The refusal of polar-bear numbers to conform to the eco-pessimists’ narrative should not be a surprise. In 2009, Al Gore claimed that the Arctic polar ice cap could disappear in as little as five years. A decade on, that is still nowhere near happening yet. Besides, polar bears have always taken refuge on land in late summer in regions where the ice does melt, such as Hudson Bay.

Another Arctic species, the walrus, is doing so well now that it sometimes turns up on beaches in Britain. It’s the same story for fur seals, elephant seals and king penguins. A few years ago, I visited South Georgia in the Antarctic and saw thousands upon thousands of all three species, when little over a century ago they would have been very rare there.

These whales, seals, penguins and bears are booming for a very simple reason: we stopped killing them. Their meat could not compete with beef. And, above all, their fur and blubber could not compete with petroleum products. Or to put it another way, fossil fuels saved the whale.

April 5, 2024

Canada’s carbon tax – “… no emissions policy that doesn’t start with banning private jets can be called ‘fair’ with a straight face”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Clarke Ries points out the incredibly uncomfortable truth that no matter how the federal government tries to hide it, the carbon tax regime is going to be painful and the pain is going to be absorbed much more by the rural poor than anyone else:

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020 (when he was Canadian Heritage Minister).
Screencapture from CPAC video.

Consumption taxes are a straightforwardly-effective policy tool. You simply increase the price of the resource you want to see used less and let people adapt to the simulated scarcity via ingenuity, frugality, lifestyle change, repricing their goods and services, etc. The government doesn’t dictate solutions, it lets people find their own. In the process, the consumption tax dispassionately reveals who’s making the most valuable use of that resource.

[…]

So the question remains, who uses a lot of carbon but doesn’t make a lot of money doing it? Who lives in drafty old single-family houses? Who uses archaic methods of keeping those houses warm, like furnaces that run on heating oil? Who has to drive halfway around the world to reach the nearest grocery store and halfway to the moon for the nearest medical clinic? Who’s making that drive in a battered old ride with terrible fuel economy?

The rural poor.

Not the farmers or the ranchers, who mostly make plenty of dough and often know their way around America’s higher-end resort towns, but the rural poor. The kind of people you disproportionately find in Newfoundland outports, eking out a tenuous living as they wait for the cod to return. You know, reliable Liberal voters.

Put another way, a neutrally-applied carbon tax goes after Maritimers first and hardest — forcing them to close shop on their romantic traditional lifestyle and move into apartment blocks in the nearest city, where they’ll earn more for their labour and emit less carbon doing it.

[…]

Remember: for the carbon tax to do what it says on the tin, somebody has to lose. For the carbon tax to be anything other than a purposeless pain in the ass, somebody — a lot of somebodies, frankly, if the Liberals are serious about cutting carbon emissions to 40 per cent under 2005 levels — must be forced to make significant and unpleasant lifestyle changes.

So let’s assume the Parliamentary Budget Office is right, and that Atlantic Canadians are now, after a second round of special supplements and exemptions, definitely net beneficiaries of the carbon tax. All it’s bought the Liberals is a reprise of the same question: who’s for dinner?

Who’s going to trade in their beater for bus tickets? Who’s going to raise their kids in a condo tower instead of a single-family home? Who’s going to start taking their midwinter vacation in the province next door instead of Palm Springs or Costa Rica? Who’s going to shiver on a cold night instead of raising the thermostat?

Only the most diehard of optimists could believe that the roster of ritual sacrifices will substantially consist of financially-comfortable Canadians. The people who can afford to make investments that reduce their carbon emissions without materially sacrificing their lifestyles will do so. A handful will start biking to work during the summer. Others will install solar panels on top of their detached houses — which are mostly located in neighbourhoods where you’re not even allowed to build a condo tower — and that’s going to be that.

Beneath all the aspirational language, what an effective carbon tax actually does is throw the government into a cage match with Canada’s working class. The truth behind the Liberals’ woes on this file is that as long as they’re committed to the carbon tax as a tool for fighting climate change, their only real choice is which part of the working class they land on when they come off the top rope.

February 3, 2024

The climate alarmists long ago gave up honest scientific reporting

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tom Knighton says he used to fully buy in to the climate alarmist message, but eventually realized the fix had been in for years, especially when it came to the predictive ability of all the climate change models … as in, their total lack of predictive ability:

When Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out, I watched it. I was terrified by the world being described, and since I was still pretty liberal and sort of an environmentalist, I took it all to heart.

Over time, as my personal politics shifted, I still had concerns regarding climate change. After all, it is what it is, right?

Until I came to look deeper into the issue and the one thing that shattered my belief in the whole concept: The fact that not a single climate model has ever panned out as predicted despite pretty much none of the draconian measures we’re told we need in order to avert disaster ever coming to fruition.

Science is supposed to be predictive. If it can’t predict something in its models, then scientists need to back up and figure out what the problem is. Instead, they seemingly just keep doubling down.

[…]

Let’s be clear here, the idea of taking measurements in heat islands is freshman year stuff. There’s absolutely no way they’re unaware the effect that’s having on their readings, even as most of their instruments are subject to heat bias.

In other words, I can’t accept this is a good faith error.

No, I believe this to be malicious.

Climatology isn’t exactly a field of science that would ever be considered sexy. Before all the climate alarmism, research grants were likely few and far between. People weren’t overly worried about the climate because it simply ways.

Then scientists started screaming that we were all doomed. The end is nigh, they told us, screaming at the top of their lung and acting just shy of wearing a sandwich board in Times Square.

With that came money and prestige.

Suddenly, climatologist could get recognition and write bestselling books. They could get grants from everyone and their brother to fund their research. The thing is, they had to keep up the charade. People had to believe that we were going to die if we didn’t do something.

Maybe they actually want the draconian measures they suggest, measures that pretty much amount to going back to living in mud huts, but with solar- and wind-created electricity so we won’t need to burn wood to survive.

Or something.

November 16, 2023

Why progressives love all forms of public transit

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton reminds conservatives and other non-progressives that trains, buses, and other forms of mass transit are beloved of the left at least partly because the more people depend on it, the more control the government gains over their freedom of movement:

TTCImages by Canadian8958
Wikimedia Commons

Ask most people on the broad Right what they think about public transportation and they’d probably tell you that they don’t like it. And it’s not just because of the smell and the gum stuck to the seats. Most of us, deep down inside, at least in some subconscious way, feel that mass public transportation is just a little bit communist.

[…]

This is probably much of the reason why we’re in love with the automobile. With the wide-open spaces and abundant road system we enjoy in America, most Rightists would never dream of trying to force everyone to use an archaic, 19th century technology like trains now that we don’t have to. The automobile is a symbol of freedom. You can go wherever there’s a road, no matter how big or small, when you’re in an automobile. You’re not boxed in with dozens of other people on a line that goes one place only. This is why we generally tend to view air travel as a necessary evil — if somebody invented a car that could get us from Boston to Los Angeles in six hours for a business meeting, we’d probably opt for that instead of getting groped by your friendly neighborhood TSA agent.

Progressive leftists know all of this. They know that the freedom to travel where we want, when we want, how we want, is a psychological buttress to our sense of liberty. Pod-people stay put and go where they’re told. Free men hop into their ’67 Mustang and lay rubber in front of a Dairy Queen three towns over from their own.

Hence, in their never-ending quest to gain total control over our lives, the Left has been putting into play a number of plans designed to limit our freedom of travel.

In case you weren’t aware, one of the purposes served by forcing gasoline prices sky-high is to make private automobile travel prohibitively expensive for more and more people. This has been a major thrust in the “global warming” nonsense that the Left has pushed as well — cars supposedly account for the lion’s share of carbon dioxide emissions (even though they actually don’t), so their use needs to be reduced. Way back in the Obama administration, somebody in the Congressional Budget Office accidentally let the cat out of the bag that it would be a great, absolutely smashing, idea to tax Americans for each mile they drive. Every so often the idea gets resurrected in the media, but thankfully doesn’t seem to have gotten much traction yet. Of course, this is essentially what already happens to us anywise, since we have to pay taxes on each gallon we buy to drive those miles. Presumably, this mileage tax would be added on top of the gas taxes already in place.

The whole point to this is not to “stop global warming”. Let’s face it, those in the know at the top of the progressive hierarchy know that global warming is a hoax. They know it’s just prole-feed for the useful idiots in their own ranks and for the easily swayable among the public at-large. The point to inducing people to stop driving cars is not to save the earth, but to reduce the freedom of movement that people have. Take away cars and you take away the ability of most people to travel for pleasure. You take away their means of conveniently conducting much of their commerce and other business. You would prevent them from being able to have forest hideaways and beach homes. In short, you prevent the middle and working classes from having the same things that the rich can have, you keep them from having lifestyles that even begin to approach the type, if not the extent, of the global transnational elite. Most of all, you would take away that psychological sense of freedom that the ability to move about unhindered gives to people. It’s about forcing us all into the Agenda 2030 “You’ll own nothing and be happy” scenarios that the globalist world-planners have prepared for us.

More recently, and more concretely, is the Congressional effort (which ineffectual Republicans failed to stop) that would direct automobile manufacturers to include a “kill switch” into all vehicles made after 2026, a device which would allow authorities to shut down a vehicle remotely. Ostensibly, the reason would be if the driver is acting like he or she is driving while impaired (i.e. it’s FoR yoUr SaFeTy!!1!). Of course, we know the actual reason is to provide bureaucrats and functionaries in the managerial state the means to freeze the movement of dissidents and others who run afoul of the Regime’s dictates. Don’t think they’d do that? Well, these are the same people who just put the infant son of a J6 defendant on the no-fly terrorist watch list.

So, what would have to replace private automobile travel, once nobody but the super-rich will be allowed it? Public mass transportation, of course. Buses, light rail, subways. This has already largely happened to those poor unfortunates who dwell within our large cities and for whom the lack of parking, expensive personal property taxes, and archaic road systems have already removed the automobile from being a viable alternative. The lefties work to extend this system even to places, such as smaller cities, the suburbs, and even the exurbs, where such systems normally would not be “needed” or desired. Make parking in the city so scarce as to be impossible to find, or so expensive that you’d rather take the bus. Provide “free” bus service (paid for by the taxes of productive, automobile-driving people, of course) to encourage people to stop polluting. In several places, the lefties keep trying to push their light rail boondoggles so that the system can be extended between cities — no more need to have people killing Mother Gaia with highway driving. These public systems are there to take up the slack once private transportation is turned into road pizza.

So how does this affect our freedom? Well, it’s because of the fact that mass transportation is inherently restrictive in its approach to people delivery. A bus route can’t include every single possible place that people might want to get on or off the bus. It only follows certain routes. Same with AmTrak, with light rail, subways, etc. It’s easier, then, to control the access which people have to transportation.

November 5, 2023

Dear Supreme Court of Canada, “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh outlines the arguments the federal government used to persuade a majority of the sitting justices of the Supreme Court of Canada to greenlight Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax tax grab and wonders if they suspect they got fast-talked:

The decision agreeing to this was signed by six of the nine justices of the court: Richard Wagner, Rosalie Abella, Michael Moldaver, Andromache Karakatsanis, Sheilah Martin and Nicholas Kasirer. Today I confront these eminences with the immortal question once asked by Johnny Rotten: ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Last week the Liberal government whose hirelings rhapsodized about the urgent, indivisible, inherently national nature of carbon pricing announced a “temporary” total exemption for fuel oil used for home heating. This has the effect of letting some households in the Atlantic provinces out of a tax that applies to cleaner BTUs in the rest of the country, and the targeted regional nature of this move has been emphasized rather than concealed by Liberal ministers.

Oh, to be sure, it’s temporary. The three-year duration of the exemption just happens to push its expiry past the next federal election. What happens at that point, who knows? And to be sure, the exemption applies to fuel oil for home heating everywhere in Canada where the federal carbon tax applies. It just so happens that the electorally crucial Atlantic is the only place where a significant number of households still depend on the system. The Liberals can perhaps say with a straight face that there is no conflict here with the underpinnings of the arguments that succeeded so beautifully in the Supreme Court.

But if the GGPPA References were re-litigated now, after the attempt to impose the carbon tax and the panicky local retreat, one wonders whether the “national concern” blarney would seem quite so convincing. We are not, in turns out, all in this leaky planetary lifeboat together. The urgency of carbon pricing, it turns out, is not quite paramount and transcendent. Its indivisibility and inherent nationalness are not as promised. The Liberals didn’t want to save the planet quite so much, it seems, as they just wanted to make the rules for their own electoral benefit.

At The Line, Harrison Ruess, who recently switched his home heating solution from a mixed oil and propane to just propane, wonders why his choice to go with the lower-carbon option will end up penalizing him under the latest policy change by the feds:

Indeed, in looking deeper at the regional numbers, the concern about the rising cost of living and housing affordability isn’t particularly acute in Atlantic Canada versus other parts of the country. The chart below, provided to me by David Coletto at Abacus Data, and published here at The Line first, reveals just how difficult a position the PM has now staked out for his government. While Atlantic Canadians are somewhat more concerned about housing affordability than average, they are very slightly less concerned than the average Canadian about the overall rising cost of living. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, for example, the opposite is true: they’re less concerned than average about housing affordability, but more concerned than average about the rising cost of living.

The takeaway to me in looking at this is that all Canadians are worried about costs and affordability.

The other question that jumped to mind is: why only heating oil? Heating oil is useful in places without good access to natural gas pipelines, and that does include much of Atlantic Canada, but also to rural areas everywhere, where other fuels, such as propane or wood pellets, are also used. According to the propane association, there are about 200,000 Canadian homes using propane — of which about 30,000 are in Atlantic Canada.

I can speak to this with some personal experience. When my wife and I purchased our home in semi-rural Ottawa, it had a Frankenstein heating system that used heating oil for part of our home and propane for another. Just this summer we completed a (somewhat expensive) rationalization of our system to combine the two into one larger, though more efficient, propane system.

Having one system will hopefully save us money on maintenance and hydro costs — powering and maintaining one system should cost less than two. It will also save us a couple hundred bucks a year on our home insurance (did you know there’s an extra premium if you have a heating oil tank? Welcome to rural life, dear readers.) Ditching the oil and expanding the propane is also good environmentally, since the carbon impact of propane is considerably less.

But we didn’t get a break from the federal government. We’d only have gotten it if we’d gone the other way, and used the more polluting fuel. Why punish my family for heating our home using the cleaner fuel?

And why not provide an exemption for natural gas? It’s cleaner still. And why not people in cities? They don’t want to freeze either, and we’re all broke. The carbon tax isn’t helping, no matter which fuel you’re using or which part of the country you call home. The ultimate challenge the government will face is that they cannot talking-point their way out of a reality.

November 2, 2023

The carbon tax has been murdered, by Justin Trudeau, in the House, with a blatant self-interest

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Murphy believes the much-hated carbon tax — the Laurentian Elite’s revenge on working Canadians — has been dealt its mortal blow by the least likely suspect:

Justin Trudeau came into office on the spume of Canadian-level celebrity, built on a persona of ostentatious, idle gestures and token cheer (selfies, socks, costumes), the endless vocalization of woke crackerjack-box slogans and a smile cemented in place that had all the warmth of well-gelled cement. Just style. Style, understood as the adoption of surface mannerisms in place of deeply settled convictions, convictions built on a real attempt to understand Canada, to relate to all its regions, and an appreciation (which does not mean agreement) of the ideas, lifestyles and situations of mainstream Canadians: style adopted as a campaign dynamic.

It’s worth reminding that from the moment of its first swearing-in, the Liberal government has been an administration of show and tactics: tactics have been its policy, tactics have been its governing lifeblood. Policies — in so far as it can be said to have had policies — have been merely (temporary) scaffolding or window displays meant to shore up the tactics. They have not been, as with an honourable government, needful measures for Canadian well-being, shored up not by tactics but by their obvious benefit and their consonance with what Canadians made clear were their concerns.

Canada’s predominant commitment these past eight painful years, the “one ring to rule them all”, the only government commitment held with deepest conviction we have been told, has been combatting global warming. It is different. It is real policy. It is the core principle. It is immutable because its cause is existential. It has been Canada’s passport to an admiring progressive world. Above all it has absolutely glowed with virtue-signalling and superior progressive sensibility. It has been as good as a wristband was at a rock concert years back.

For all of his eight years Trudeau has incessantly promoted and promulgated his single cause. At home he has out-Suzukied David Suzuki, out-Mayed Elizabeth May, and there have been moments when he “out-dared” Greta. Abroad, he has been climate alarmism’s smiling Galahad.

Global warming has been his religion, and what he calls the carbon tax both eucharist and passport to net-zero paradise. To an increasingly skeptical Canadian public, anxious and distrustful of a government regularly racked by scandal and heroic mismanagement, he said (I paraphrase): “I know I’m taxing a necessity — heat for homes in northerly Canada — and I know it must hit the poor first and worst. But it’s to save the world! Saving the world keeps me up at night. And I want Canada to lead the way in saving it. And for that, there must be a tax on energy, on gas and oil, on heating. It must be done. It’s a sacrifice poets will write in praise of in the lower-temperature world we will be key to making happen.”

The tax on carbon dioxide — the great comedians of the Liberal party called it a “tax on pollution” — had to be imposed, even as inflation ravaged the country and further immiserated the already sufficiently immiserate, because Trudeau had a whole world to save. It was the signature element of the signature policy of Trudeau’s showcase government. It was the indispensable girder in building a post-oil-and-gas future for a post-nationalist Canada, the indestructible bridge to a golden net-zero tomorrow for our country. And, incidentally, a great shiny glittering Last Spike to doom Conservative Alberta’s economy and government, and no little whack for Saskatchewan.

This was principle as policy, and policy as principle. For seven plus years.

And now. A few fingers snapped somewhere and suddenly, Mr. Trudeau … cancels the carbon tax. Cancel for one and you must cancel for all.

October 27, 2023

Two wild-eyed optimists claim that things aren’t as bad as you think

Filed under: Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Who lets these dangerous lunatics talk to the press? If anyone listens to them, they may get unwarranted optimistic notions that go against the narrative:

Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

War is endlessly and eternally horrific. It is understandable and even necessary that the media spotlights today’s conflicts. But this can make us believe that we’re living through unprecedented violence. Russia’s war indeed meant that battle deaths in 2022 reached a high for this century, but they are still very low by historical standards. Last year, 3.5 in 100,000 people died as a consequence of war, below even the 1980s and far below the 20th-century average of 30 per 100,000. The world has in fact become much more peaceful.

This is of course little consolation to those living in conflict zones. But the data speaks to the problem with the constant barrage of contextless catastrophe and doom. Analysis of media content across 130 countries from 1970 to 2010 indicates that the emotional tone has dramatically and consistently become more negative. Negativity sells, but it informs badly.

The same pattern characterizes climate change reporting. A pervasive and false apocalyptic narrative draws together every negative event — ignoring the bigger picture almost entirely. Last summer, for example, forest fires made headlines, but coverage largely failed to mention that the annual burned global area has been declining for decades, reaching the lowest level ever last year. Likewise, deaths from droughts and floods make fill the front pages, but we don’t hear that deaths from such climate-related disasters have declined 50-fold over the past century.

The data show what we all fundamentally know: the world has improved dramatically. Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Two centuries ago, almost everyone was illiterate. Now, almost everyone can read. In 1820, nearly 90 per cent of people lived in extreme poverty. Now it’s less than 10 per cent. Indoor air pollution has declined dramatically, and its outdoor equivalent has also done so in rich countries. If we could choose when to be born, having all the facts at hand, few would choose any time before today.

This incontrovertible progress has been driven by ethical and responsible conduct, trust, well-functioning markets, the rule of law, scientific innovation and political stability. We have to recognize, appreciate and proclaim the value, and comparative rarity, of each of these.

The constant barrage of negative stories may lead us to imagine that our forward progress is about to end. However, the evidence at hand does not support this conclusion. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios indicate that, if not for climate change, the average person would be 4.5-times richer by the end of the century than they are today.

September 12, 2023

It’s funny how many of those “climate-change-caused” wildfires were actually set by arsonists

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson connects the dots on all the “natural” wildfires that have been so much in the news this summer:

Covert geo-engineering has been used for decades and this summer was used to burn down forests and towns including Lahaina to scare people into the extreme behaviour modification required for Agenda 2030 and Net Zero.

How did everyone enjoy their trauma this August? Admit it was thoroughly engaging, a blockbuster, tragic and comic by turns, everyone’s favourite Maui town incinerated and 1,000 children and hundreds of elderly dying in the worst way imaginable. Add in the keystone cops incompetence of administrators, the carelessness, the heartlessness was psychopathic. No, I don’t think that not sounding the siren was a mistake. No, I don’t think One Hawaii’s Smart Water program of shutting off the water on that day, was a mistake. No, I don’t think it was an accident that schools were closed for the day. Yes, I think the firefighters were stood down on purpose. Yes, I think the celebrities hired private fire fighters. Yes, the “winds” were engineered. Yes, Maui has the largest space supercomputing research installation in the world and of course they have Direct Energy Weapons. Yes, I think they only burned the shops and houses of lower income Hawaiians in order to take the town and land and turn it into a ghastly Dubai-like pleasure palace for the rich, heedless and criminal.

That was one motive. The other is the big one. It is to scare enough Karens to force the commodification of carbon, a multi-trillion dollar business and pretty much the only growth industry available to the psychopaths in government and the plutocracy. Make us pay to breathe. De Sade would be proud.

Admit, cap and trade is the ideal globalist organizer. It is government control without borders or limits or even the fiction of democracy. There is zero balance of power. Government is the winner, big energy companies are winners. Why don’t the oil companies fight the climate change nonsense? The science isn’t close to settled, we have had scandal after scandal of misuse and mis-management of climate data. At that level of fraud, especially since it has not had even the wisp of rigorous analysis, it should be thrown out.

These oil companies hedge years down the road. They know they can make more money trading carbon than supplying energy.

The fires will continue until we give up and allow them to sell us carbon credits in order to leave the house. Your washing machine will be turned off mid-use if you use too much energy as now happens in Switzerland.

September 7, 2023

The not-at-all hidden authoritarian desires of the climate activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the increasingly blatant wish of the comfortable greenies to impose actual judicial punishment on those who disagree with their agenda:

Greens have been dreaming about jailing “climate criminals” for a very long time. Climate-change deniers in particular will “one day have to answer for their crimes”, said eco-author Mark Lynas a few years back. Well, Gaia’s authoritarian army might finally be getting its way. The new Energy Bill currently before the UK House of Commons provides for “the creation of criminal offences”, possibly including jail time, where there is “non-compliance” with energy-saving regulations. Shorter version: keep the lights on for too long and you could end up in the slammer.

The Telegraph is reporting that property owners who fail to adhere to “energy-performance regulations” could “face prison” under the government’s crazy plans. There is concern that homeowners, landlords and business bosses could be whacked with fines of up to £15,000 or a year behind bars if they fall foul of regulations on energy consumption. The government says it has no plans to make it a crime to be an eco-unfriendly user of light and heat, but the bill allows for the creation of such crimes. And this has rattled some MPs. They’re concerned that ministers would be able to “create new offences with limited parliamentary scrutiny” thanks to the new bill.

What is the aim of all this tightening of the screws on energy use? Of the possible future criminalisation of us thieves of heat and light? To help Britain reach its Net Zero targets, of course. Like other Western nations, we’re committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050. And if that means strongarming the little folk into reducing their energy use, so be it. Let’s be clear about what the new bill’s provision for the creation of crimes really represents: the state threatening to punish anyone who refuses to convert to the religion of Net Zero and to sacrifice their energy to the jealous god of environmentalism.

We can now see the iron fist in the green glove. There’s been a creeping criminalisation of eco-disobedient behaviour for some time now. In the UK, we’ve had “rubbish police” looking through people’s bags of trash and slapping them with a £100 fine if they are not properly recycling plastic and paper. Under Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes, officious local councils erect eyesore bollards to stop people from driving on certain roads, and fine them if they fail to comply. In recent years, more than a million such fines have been served on defiers of the LTN regime, raising more than £100million for the Net Zero cultists who rule over us.

Then there’s London mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), now expanded to cover every inch of London. Hundreds of cameras have been installed across the capital, a vast infrastructure of Stasi-like watchmen, to ensure that drivers of “dirty” vehicles have paid the daily ULEZ toll of £12.50. A fine of £500 awaits any driver of a sinful car who hasn’t. To those saying “Of course the government isn’t going to fine people for un-green behaviour!”, wake up – officialdom has been doing this for years.

September 6, 2023

“[W]hy does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? … it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Patrick T. Brown in The Free Press on how he had to leave out the full truth on climate change to get his paper published:

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal”.

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—”Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California” — focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

[…] as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years — there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s — it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

August 28, 2023

Climate alarmists don’t see costs (to you) as a drawback

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Friedman explains why few if any climate change activists would bother to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the “solutions” they demand to address climate change:

From the standpoint of an economist, the logic of global warming is straightforward. There are costs to letting it happen, there are costs to preventing it, and by comparing the two we decide what, if anything, ought to be done. But many of the people supporting policies to reduce climate change do not see the question that way. What I see as costs, they see as benefits.

Reduced energy use is a cost if you approve of other people being able to do what they want, which includes choosing to live in the suburbs, drive cars instead of taking mass transit, heat or air condition their homes to what they find a comfortable temperature. It is a benefit if you believe that you know better than other people how they should live their lives, know that a European style inner city with a dense population, local stores, local jobs, mass transit instead of private cars, is a better, more human lifestyle than living in anonymous suburbs, commuting to work, knowing few of your neighbors. It is an attitude that I associate with an old song about little boxes made of ticky-tacky, houses the singer was confident that people shouldn’t be living in, occupied by people whose life style she disapproved of. A very arrogant, and very human, attitude.

There are least three obvious candidates for reducing global warming that do not require a reduction in energy use. One is nuclear power, a well established if currently somewhat expensive technology that produces no CO2 and can be expanded more or less without limit. One is natural gas, which produces considerably less carbon dioxide per unit of power than coal, for which it is the obvious substitute. Fracking has now sharply lowered the price of natural gas with the result that U.S. output of CO2 has fallen. The third and more speculative candidate is geoengineering, one or another of several approaches that have been suggested for cooling earth without reducing CO2 output.

One would expect that someone seriously worried about global warming would take an interest in all three alternatives. In each case there are arguments against as well as arguments for but someone who sees global warming as a serious, perhaps existential, problem ought to be biased in favor, inclined to look for arguments for, not arguments against.

That is not how people who campaign against global warming act. They are less likely than others, not more, to support nuclear power, to approve of fracking as a way of producing lots of cheap natural gas, or to be in favor of experiments to see whether one or another version of geoengineering will work. That makes little sense if they see a reduction in power consumption as a cost, quite a lot if they see it as a benefit.

[…]

The cartoon shown below, which gets posted to Facebook by people arguing for policies to reduce global warming, implies that they are policies they would be in favor of even if warming was not a problem. It apparently does not occur to them that that is a reason for others to distrust their claims about the perils of climate change.

Most would see the point in a commercial context, realize that the fact that someone is trying to sell you a used car is a good reason to be skeptical of his account of what good condition it is in. Most would recognize it in the political context, providing it was not their politics; many believe that criticism of CAGW is largely fueled by the self-interest of oil companies. It apparently does not occur to them that the same argument applies to them, that from the standpoint of the people they want to convince the cartoon is a reason to be more skeptical of their views, not less.1

That is an argument for skepticism of my views as well. Belief in the dangers of climate change provides arguments for policies, large scale government intervention in how people live their lives, that I, as a libertarian, disapprove of, giving me an incentive to believe that climate change is not very dangerous. That is a reason why people who read my writings on the subject should evaluate the arguments and evidence on their merits.

    1. One commenter on my blog pointed at a revised version of the cartoon, designed to make the point by offering the same approach in a different context.

August 27, 2023

Climategate 2023: Electric Boogaloo? The first time as tragedy, the second as farce?

Filed under: Environment, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Climate Sceptic, Chris Morrison outlines the circumstances around the retraction of a journal article critical of the “climate consensus”:

Shocking details of corruption and suppression in the world of peer-reviewed climate science have come to light with a recent leak of emails. They show how a determined group of activist scientists and journalists combined to secure the retraction of a paper that said a climate emergency was not supported by the available data. Science writer and economist Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has published the startling emails and concludes: “Shenanigans continue in climate science, with influential scientists teaming up with journalists to corrupt peer review”.

The offending paper was published in January 2022 in a Springer Nature journal and at first attracted little attention. But on September 14th the Daily Sceptic covered its main conclusions and as a result it went viral on social media with around 9,000 Twitter retweets. The story was then covered by both the Australian and Sky News Australia. The Guardian activist Graham Readfearn, along with state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP), then launched counterattacks. AFP “Herald of the Anthropocene” Marlowe Hood said the data were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”.

After nearly a year of lobbying, Springer Nature has retracted the popular article. In the light of concerns, the Editor-in-Chief is said to no longer have confidence in the results and conclusion reported in the paper. The authors were invited to submit an addendum but this was “not considered suitable for publication”. The leaked emails show that the addendum was sent for review to four people, and only one objected to publication.

What is shocking about this censorship is that the paper was produced by four distinguished scientists, including three professors of physics, and was heavily based on data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lead author was Professor Gianluca Alimonti of Milan University and senior researcher of Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics. Their paper reviewed the available data, but refused to be drawn into the usual mainstream narrative that catastrophises cherry-picked weather trends. During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no “clear positive trend of extreme events”. In addition, the scientists noted considerable growth of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In fact this scandal has started to attract comparison with the Climategate leaks of 2009 that also displayed considerable contempt for the peer-review process. One of the co-compilers of the Met Office’s HadCRUT global temperature database Dr. Phil Jones emailed Michael Mann, author of the infamous temperature “hockey stick”, stating: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!”

August 26, 2023

The Cloward-Piven strategy in action

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Solway outlines the “playbook” apparently being followed in the ongoing dismantling of western civilization:

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 Rules for Radicals, and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, The Breaking of the American Social Compact.

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change”. A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

August 22, 2023

“… the theatrics employed by Hitler and Mussolini just seemed too weird and downright ridiculous to the British”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Germany, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Ralph Schoellhammer discusses some of the difficulties the Green Gestapo, er, I mean the likes of Extinction Rebellion and their mini-mes like Just Stop Oil have been encountering with the British public:

Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, leader of the “Saviours of Britain”, also known as the Black Shorts.
Still from Jeeves and Wooster (1990).

I have long been convinced that one of the reasons why fascism never had a chance in Britain was due to the predispositions of her people. If nothing else, the theatrics employed by Hitler and Mussolini just seemed too weird and downright ridiculous to the British.

PG Wodehouse captured this perfectly in an exchange between a British wannabe fascist, Roderick Spode, and Bertie Wooster: “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone.”

I don’t intend to liken fascists to environmentalists, but Brits have at least expressed a similar, visceral distaste for the theatrics of eco-activist groups in recent years. Marching in black “footer bags”, pretending to be the voice of the people, is just as ridiculous as holding up traffic in an orange “Just Stop Oil” t-shirt.

The environmental movement becomes more absurd by the day. The Guardian‘s George Monbiot, for instance, has just called for the reintroduction of deadly wolves and lynxes to Great Britain, in order to manage a surging deer population. One can only hope that this call to action will have about as much success as his campaign against meat, milk and eggs, which Monbiot is convinced are an “indulgence” humanity can no longer afford.

Sadly, the same is not true in Germany, where the elites are all too keen to humour even the most extreme climate fanatics. German discount supermarket Penny recently decided to increase the prices of its meat and dairy products, to include the environmental costs incurred in their production, as part of a week-long experiment. The price of frankfurter sausages rose from €3.19 to €6.01. The price of mozzarella rose by 74 per cent, to €1.55. And the price of fruit yoghurt rose by 31 per cent, from €1.19 to €1.56.

While the usual suspects in the establishment are clearly excited by this idea that in the future even shopping at a discount shop might become the preserve of the rich, average Germans are less pleased. Germany’s public broadcaster, WDR, asked Penny customers what they thought about the price-hike experiment. Due to a lack of enthusiasm from shoppers, WDR decided to have one of its employees cosplay as a happy shopper. That taxpayer-funded broadcasters now have to resort to outright fraud in order to drum up support for idiotic climate action tells you everything you need to know.

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