“The world is threatened with a rise in average temperature which, if it reached 4 or 5 degrees, could melt the polar ice caps, raise sea level by as much as 300 feet and cause a worldwide flood.”
You’ll be forgiven if you thought that quote was courtesy of the proponents of the Green New Deal. It was published in Newsweek on January 26, 1970; Ayn Rand quotes it in the “The Anti-Industrial Revolution.”[1] (At the link you’ll find a presentation, created by the Ayn Rand Institute, in which a recording of Miss Rand delivering her 1970 lecture is illustrated with film footage. I highly recommend it. Watch and share.)
My point is: this rhetoric has been around for decades. When warming didn’t happen, the rhetoric changed to threats of freezing, which morphed back to warming. Rather than acknowledge defeat and accept the truth about industrial progress, the catastrophists selected a new name to cover all claims of climate catastrophe: “climate change.”
The latest trend is “carbon neutrality”:
Carbon neutrality refers to achieving net zero carbon dioxide emissions by balancing carbon dioxide emissions with removal (often through carbon offsetting) or simply eliminating carbon dioxide emissions altogether (the transition to the “post-carbon economy”).[2]
Consider that innocent-sounding phrase: “simply eliminating carbon dioxide emissions altogether.” Since they do not address the obvious, let me state it for you: we human beings emit carbon dioxide all the time – by breathing! The only way to “simply eliminate carbon dioxide emissions altogether” is by dying.
First of all, the idea that carbon dioxide has to be eliminated is scientifically wrong. It’s elementary-school stuff, but let’s review, shall we? We humans (and other warm-blooded species) have a symbiotic relationship with green plants. They produce oxygen as a waste product, which we consume to stay alive. We produce carbon dioxide as a waste, which they consume to stay alive. The entire process is as natural and simple as can be. The argument that we need to reduce or eliminate carbon dioxide is completely wrong. To take drastic action to curtail industry in order to achieve this goal is suicidal. A group calling itself “the green movement” should be embarrassed to advocate such claptrap.
The catastrophists have convinced themselves otherwise. They’ve latched onto “fossil fuel divestment,” which “aims to reduce carbon emissions by accelerating the adoption of the renewable energy transition through the stigmatisation of fossil fuel companies.”[3]
Now, if it were true that reducing fossil fuel use could make a difference, then what about increasing fossil fuel use? What difference would that make? Between 1970 and 2017, fossil fuel use more than doubled. The number of hours rose from about 53 million terawatt-hours to 133 million terawatt-hours per annum globally.[4] We should be roasting or floating or whatever dire consequence was predicted would befall us.
Instead, and despite this huge increase in fossil fuel use, nothing has substantially changed in the weather. And the anti-industrial crowd hasn’t altered its rhetoric. They’re still prattling the same line of patter about “12 more years to save the planet.” Isn’t that interesting?
Why haven’t they taken the new data into account? Could it be because the amount of industry that man engages in makes no real difference to the climate on this planet?
Take a look at this very interesting chart from 2007:[5]
Glacial ice and air bubbles trapped in it (top) preserve an 800,000-year record of temperature & carbon dioxide. Earth has cycled between ice ages (low points, large negative anomalies) and warm interglacials (peaks). (Photograph courtesy National Snow & Ice Data Center. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data from Jouzel et al., 2007.)
The NASA article in which it appears explains:
Bubbles of air in glacial ice trap tiny samples of Earth’s atmosphere, giving scientists a history of greenhouse gases that stretches back more than 800,000 years. The chemical make-up of the ice provides clues to the average global temperature.
The year “0” is present-day. During the past 800,000 years, average global temperatures have cycled up and down in a pattern. And we are currently in the midst of a “going up” cycle. In other words, the average temperatures are going up, albeit slowly, and also not that much, but they are going to steadily increase for the foreseeable thousand years.
This glacial ice evidence in support of “increased temperatures” means that increasing temperatures have nothing to do with human activity.
800,000 years is larger than human lifespans by many orders of magnitude. We won’t be around to discover that de-industrialization was exactly the wrong move to have made at this time in human history. Without energy, there is NO way to handle a much warmer or a much colder climate. Without energy, there is NO way to handle whatever climate dishes out, anywhere, anytime.
Here’s where we must ask another question. If climate catastrophe is such rubbish, why are today’s politicians willing to support it?
Why are they in agreement that the non-event of climate disaster should be treated as if it were an emergency?
What’s in it for them?
Let’s remember that somebody came up with the idea of “carbon taxes.” Ahhh-HA! When no-one blinked at the idea that “carbon dioxide” should be treated as a pollutant, politicians realized that carbon taxes could be the answer to their failed Ponzi scheme called Social Security.
Social Security… fundamentally operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. The tax payments of current taxpayers are not saved and invested to finance their own future benefits. Rather, most current tax payments are immediately paid out to finance the benefits for current retirees. Future benefits for present taxpayers are to be paid out of the future tax payments of future workers when today’s taxpayers are in retirement. Consequently, large cash reserves to finance benefits are never developed in such a system.[6]
When populations increase, money rolls in because there are plenty of people paying taxes to finance the scheme, hiding its basic nature. But when population drops, the system runs into a little problem. Furthermore, factor in that greater numbers of people are living longer, collecting Social Security all the while. When fewer young people are available to finance those retirees, now we have a big problem.
Government insisted we couldn’t be trusted to save for our retirement. It turns out government couldn’t be trusted to save our money for our retirement, either. But the vital point to keep in mind is that just like the money paid into Social Security was spent elsewhere, so the way to keep paying Social Security benefits is to take money from elsewhere.
This in my view is the dirty little secret behind the massive push to enact the “Green New Deal.” It has nothing to do with the climate, and everything to do with a debt-ridden bureaucracy desperate for a source of income to cover the Social Security shortfalls.
Once politicians grasped that people were supporting the idea of “carbon taxes,” they leapt onto the bandwagon. Everyone who supports carbon taxes has been deaf to evidence, deaf to science, deaf to anything but the looming problem of the general public realizing that the government has created a massive problem by spending the retirement money confiscated for our benefit, which it was supposed to keep in trust.
(Incidentally, the government has done a far worse job of saving for our retirement than, acting individually, we would have done for ourselves. We’ve all been thrown into the same boat as the most irresponsible spendthrift.)
“Climate change” works so well as the trojan horse for this desperate funding ploy. There needs to be no connection shown – no politician needs to explain that carbon taxes are intended to be used to fund social security benefits. As long as enough people buy into the myth that climate change is an emergency that our actions can avert, a large enough segment of the population will vote for carbon tax implementation.
To save our lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren, we have to realize that climate catastrophe – and the proposals to “fight” it – are all wrong! We have to grasp this now, while we still have our industries and our reliable energy. We have to grasp that we have longer healthier lives because of industrialization. Indeed, we have made climate almost irrelevant thanks to the energy to heat and cool our buildings, to control the climate inside our structures.
The trajectory of Earth’s average temperature is on the increase. No action of ours can stop it. It is a cycle that is beyond our ability to prevent or to accelerate. It will happen regardless of what we do. If we cut our industrial activity to zero, the result will be hundreds of millions of premature deaths. No meaningful change to the climate will occur.
“Fighting” the climate is as pointless as shaking one’s fist at the sun. The climate change disaster scenario has to be rejected for the phony trojan horse that is. The answer has never been to fight climate. Instead of transitioning away from fossil fuels, let’s transition away from climate catastrophe.
As for dealing with the government Ponzi schemes (social security is just one of them), that will be the subject of a future article.
For more information on energy issues, check out Alex Epstein’s energytalkingpoints.com.
Thank you for reading.
References
[1] The essay “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” was delivered as a lecture in 1970 and published the following year in the volume of essays now entitled The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_neutrality
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_divestment
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
[5] NASA, “How is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?” NASA Earth Observatory (Jun 3, 2010).
[6] https://fee.org/articles/the-coming-financial-collapse-of-social-security/ article by Peter Ferrara, November 1993
