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According to Naomi Klein and Bernie Sanders, who spoke at a recent “Sanders Institute” event, if we don’t cut fossil fuel use in half (completely arbitrary figure) by 2030 (another completely arbitrary time period)…our existence as a human race is imperiled. This is not science. This is voodoo…this is politics. If “climate change” were posing a dire threat to the existence of the human race, we would not have 1. rapidly increasing life expectancy, including in the countries that are the biggest carbon emitters 2. rapidly increasing food production 3. a rapid increase in countries that are eliminating extreme poverty (most notably in Latin America and Asia)…
“Climate change” is the big trendy scientific fad of our generation…(with celebrity Hollywood backers like Leonardo DiCaprio to boot), but what are we going to have to say about the whole movement in 50 years? 100 years? 1,000 years? Are we really going to look back and say that climate change in 2018 was the greatest threat to the existence of the human race?
I can’t answer that question definitively, but I doubt it.
I, for one, think radical Islam and socialism/Communism pose a far greater threat to the existence of humanity (particularly in peace and prosperity) than carbon emissions. The climate change movement often raises the issues of asthma and bronchitis. Sanders specifically suggests in this interview that 25% of children in the South Bronx are suffering from these respiratory ailments. But how many people are really dying of these illnesses on a yearly basis in the First World? Or in the Third World?
And, on a further note, how is the First World going to turn around and say to the Third World…”You know what? We spent 150 years using fossil fuels to create the greatest wealth boom ever seen in human history. But we aren’t going to let you do that!” That is never going to happen. The Third World is not just going to magically replace oil with renewable energy, which is incapable (for now at least) of providing the same benefits.
As imperfect as oil is, it is hardly the evil made out to be by Sanders and friends. An oil-based economy has led billions of people out of extreme poverty…something that the climate change movement has not done.
And here is the real killer. Even Bernie Sanders supporters would be up in arms if he (or others) actually proposed the kind of carbon tax that would be needed ($240 a gallon gas by one UN study) to actually halve the use of fossil fuels by 2030. Democratic voters would be rioting in the streets like their French counterparts if we had $10 or $15 or $20 a gallon gas here, and if air travel suddenly doubled or tripled in price.
So, in a nutshell, I expect to hear virtue signalling from sanctimonious Democrats about how this is “the greatest threat to humanity” and if you dispute their “facts” you are a science-hating “climate change denier”…but here is the reality:
The planet is going to be just fine in 12 years without massive carbon taxes, and without halving our fossil fuel consumption.
We will be here. We are not going anywhere.
The earth is not just going to keep warming forever, melting polar ice caps and inundating the earth with massive floods. The ability of the climate change movement to predict the weather in 10 or 20 or 30 years has proved laughably inaccurate, as evidenced by Al Gore’s dire predictions in 1992 in Earth in the Balance. (You do remember, for example, when 50% of Florida’s population was forced to leave the state because of massive climate change-induced flooding?)
Ooops! Except that just the opposite happened. Rather than a massive exodus, people are flocking to Florida…hmmmmm…looks like Al Gore wasn’t so spot on with that one. Didn’t stop him from getting a Nobel Prize, though.
For those who enjoy basing their political opinions on the whims of Hollywood celebrities, for those social justice warriors who must trumpet their noble virtue signalling from the rooftops while they tell everyone else how to live their lives, for the “progressives” (read: socialists), I have a simple proposal: why don’t you pay a voluntary carbon tax to fight global warming?
Let’s see how much Bernie Sanders supporters would actually enjoy paying $10 or $15 a gallon for gas; paying $300 to fill up their cars every week, seeing the cost of flying down to Florida for that vacation skyrocketing from $149 to $750? Any takers?
Sanders and his ragtag band of socialists won’t propose a massive UN-backed carbon tax, because they are too afraid. They know that the fate of Macron in France would be their fate. If a 25 cent carbon tax increase in France shut down the country, one can only imagine what would happen here if Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez had the $10 gas they’d like to see.
Meanwhile, we will continue to enjoy the outrageous hysteria and fearmongering of our friends in the “climate change” movement.
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