Archives par mot-clé : Green Dogma

better to know...?, climate-debate

Green Grifters: Another elite-laden conference demonstrates the staggering hypocrisy of climate-change activism

by H. Mac Donald, Nov 12, 2024 in /CityJournal

The latest global climate conference opened Monday in Azerbaijan. The timing is excellent. Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration’s likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone. Here are tens of thousands of well fed, well-dressed members of the global elite—activists, employees of lavishly funded NGOs, armies of government bureaucrats, hundreds of heads of state—who have all travelled via jet and private plane to this remote corner of the Earth and who expect that every minute of their day will be supported by abundant, magically available energy. None has sacrificed a single personal comfort to save the planet. They assume that their smartphones will draw on an invisible web of transmitters and that they will be able to search the Internet and run AI queries at will, notwithstanding that doing so requires voracious energy use from a growing archipelago of server farms. They expect their PowerPoints to be well lit and their conference and hotel rooms to be heated or air conditioned as needed. They’re never without their bottled water, which is carried thousands of miles by carbon-emitting trucks and planes and kept sterile by plastic containers whose manufacture requires petrochemicals and plenty of energy. They do not wait on the sun to shine or the wind to blow to light their rooms, run their elevators, or power up their devices; they want energy now and without interruption.

You don’t have to be a “climate denier” to see that climate-change politics have become the largest global grift in history, one that grows in proportion with each new conference. It was just a matter of time before Third World basket-case countries exploited the First World’s virtue signaling. This year’s UNFCC COP 29 conference in Azerbaijan (COP stands for Conference of the Parties) features the demand that developed countries fork over billions, if not trillions, more dollars to the Global South, ostensibly to help it adjust to climate change. Those billions will follow all previous foreign aid into the same sinkhole of corruption and incompetence.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Recycling Eco-Myths Is the Existential Threat

by  P. Zane, Nov 17, 2023 in WUWT

The recycling myth – Save the planet by separating paper and plastic! – is a foundational falsity of the green movement.

By promising a relatively simple solution to an alleged problem, it has enabled the left to control behavior through a made-up morality that stigmatized dissent – Only bad people refuse to recycle.

Like most progressive interventions – from welfare policies that destroyed families while increasing dependency, to drug use reforms that have filled city streets with desperate addicts – recycling plans that sound good on paper (and plastic) have continuously collided with reality so that even liberal outlets such as the New York Times (“Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not”), NPR(“Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse”) and the Atlantic magazine (“Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work”) have finally admitted its failures.

The same dynamic is now at work regrading a far more significant green fantasy: the left’s push to decarbonize the U.S. and other Western industrial economies during the next few decades and attain an eco-purity calculus known as Net Zero. While brandishing the moral cudgel with full force – President Biden describes climate change as “an existential crisis,” i.e., every person and puppy will die if we don’t submit to his agenda – the left also suggests the transition will be easy-peasy: Just build some windmills, install some solar panels, and swap out your car, stove, and lightbulbs for cleaner and cheaper alternatives.

Though much of the cheerleading media downplays this fact, it is already clear that Biden’s enormously expensive, massively disruptive goal is a pipe dream. In a recent series of articles, my colleagues at RealClearInvestigations have reported on several of the seemingly intractable problems that the administration and its eco-allies are trying to wish away.

The dishonesty begins with the engine of the green economy – the vast array of wind and solar farms that must be constructed to replace the coal and gas facilities that power our economy. James Varney reported for RCI that the Department of Energy’s official line is that the installations required to meet Biden’s goal of “100% clean electricity” by 2035 will require “less than one-half of one percent of the contiguous U.S. land area” – or roughly 15,000 of the lower 48’s roughly 3 million square miles. However, Varney noted, “the government report that furnished those estimates also notes that the wind farm footprint alone could require an expanse nine times as large: 134,000 square miles. That is equivalent to the land mass of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky combined – plus all of New England.

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energy and fields, renewable energy

New geological study proves that the green energy movement is impossible to achieve

by R.A. Bishop, Feb 17, 2023 in LifeSite.AmericanThinker

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The comprehensive study found that the current estimated metal reserves are woefully deficient in almost every category.  The table below lists base and rare earth metals requirements to build the new grid and E.V.s.  Deficits are yellow-highlighted.  For example, copper is an integral part of a high-voltage grid system, coming up short by a shocking 3.7 billion tons.  Can we dig enough open mile-deep ore pits to meet that shortfall?  Improbable.

Table 1 Below is the study’s table estimating the years to produce the required metals at the current production rates.  For example, lithium would take almost 10 millennia to achieve.  In addition, these scarce minerals must be mined, transported, and processed, relying exclusively on fossil fuels, which would create more carbon emissions and deplete hydrocarbon reserves.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Greta Thunberg Fractures German Greens With Her Call To Continue Operation Of Hated Nuclear Power Plants

by P. Gosselin, Oct 16, 2022 in NoTricksZone

German talk show host Sandra Maischberger interviewed climate activist Greta Thunberg in her native Sweden. The interview aired on Wednesday.

Many climate policy critics see Greta Thunberg (19) as a puppet of interest groups who can’t possibly have any motivation of her own due to her young age and lack of education. It is noticeable, however, that she occasionally makes recommendations that can generate downright hatred, especially in Germany, among Green and Fridays for Future circles.

In 2019, Greta already classified nuclear power as a “small part of a big new carbon-free energy solution” – even citing publications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

She was harshly criticized for this and avoided the topic for three years. Since the Greens began in the mid-1970s as scattered citizens’ initiatives against nuclear power plants – which only later also turned to various aspects of nature conservation – energy generation from nuclear fission has become considered as a high-risk technology, and not only in left-wing educated bourgeois circles.

The fact that the civilian use of nuclear power has resulted in far fewer deaths and injuries than, for example, modern traffic or conventional power generation, is often overlooked or deliberately not communicated. The factual situation therefore no longer plays a role here, but only its political usability.

Nevertheless, Thunberg has ventured forth once again with the topic of nuclear power – albeit cautiously – and compares it to coal power, which is also maligned. In words: “If they [the German nuclear plants] are already running, I think it would be a mistake to shut them down and turn to coal.”

In FfF circles, this can already be called courageous because Greta’s popularity is especially large in the rich and populous German-speaking countries where a green-loaded media landscape made Thunberg’s idol figure possible in the first place. Next to Stockholm, Berlin is her main field of activity and here she is always received effusively and with much attention.

From the point of view of the inclined EIKE reader, the above quote is of course at best  pragmatic over the short-term, yet it does not show an attitude favorable to a sustainable economic and social welfare development. However, since Brussels redefined nuclear power as a “green” technology months ago, it can be assumed that increasingly parts of the FfF movement are also losing interest in the German government’s misguided energy policy. Perhaps in the near future Greta will already recommend the inherently safe new breeder and DFR reactor types, which already theoretically can no longer be called risky.

The fact that Greta got anointed as an expert without any objective reason is now being questioned from the point of view of nuclear power despisers.

Some in Berlin are trying to denigrate her view. The taz points to approval of Greta’s remark by the CDU conservatives and the FDP free democrats. In addition, lobbyists such as the brother of Eckart von Hirschhausen or Armin Simon are quoted:

“Greta Thunberg is mistaken when she implies that nuclear power plants could help in dealing with the current gas crisis.” (Simon)

“Nuclear power cannot be an instrument of climate policy”, (Hirschhausen, Scientists for Future).

Completely wrong – the more nuclear power plants are on the grid, the more electricity there is, and the cheaper the energy is, which is old familiar market logic. And if there is more electric power, less gas has to be burned to generate it, which benefits the bankruptcy-threatened metal and food industries. Hirschhausen is an economist and thus, in contrast to Greta, an expert. How can it be that the activist without a degree knows more about economics than the economics professor?

better to know...?

Environmentalism Is A Fundamentalist Religion Steeped In Green Dogma

by J. Kotkin, Sep 21, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn.

The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world.

And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened. [bold, links added]

This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers.

And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run. This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little.

Today’s biggest emitters come from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world’s third-largest emitter.

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