Environment
Climate Alarmists Want To Fight The Sun. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
What should we say when one of America’s pre-eminent media platforms endorses a plan so fraught with unknowns and pitfalls it invites potential global catastrophe?
That’s what the editorial board at the Washington Post did on April 27 in a 1,000-word editorial endorsing plans by radical schemers and billionaires to engage in various efforts at geoengineering.
The Post’s editors engage in an exercise of saying the quiet part out loud in the piece, morphing from referring to monkeying around with the world’s ability to absorb sunlight as “a forbidden subject,” to concluding it is “indispensable” and “urgent” in the course of a single opinion piece. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?
What could go wrong with plans to, say, block sunlight with thousands of high-altitude balloons? Or with a plan that involves spraying the upper atmosphere with billions of tons of sulfur particles? Or with a plan to spend trillions of debt-funded dollars to build a gargantuan shield placed in stationary orbit in outer space?
The editors are so cocksure in their arrogance that they even admit some such concepts have already been tried out, writing, “Climate geoengineering is so cheap and potentially game-changing that even private entrepreneurs have tried it out, albeit at small scales.”
The “small scale” experiment to which the editors refer took place in Baja, Mexico, where researchers launched two large balloons filled with sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. The goal was to measure the sun-dimming effects of the sulfur dioxide, a real, actual pollutant that the Environmental Protection Agency and regulators all over the world have spent the last half century attempting to remove from the atmosphere.
It turned out that Luke Eisman, an entrepreneur who financed the experiment, launched the balloons without seeking prior approval. When Mexican officials found out it had been conducted, they quickly moved to ban such geo-engineering projects on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty. Reuters reports that Mexico’s environment ministry statement said it would seek a global moratorium on such geoengineering projects under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
But despite such concerns in Mexico, here come the Post’s editors advocating we simply just have to trust the science. You know, like we trusted the “science” of COVID vaccines and the “science” of locating giant offshore wind farms in the middle of a whale migration corridor off the Northeast coast, right? Sure. After all, what could go wrong?
The editorial writers go on to cite a similar, larger scale project being promoted by climate-engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale. These gentlemen propose to try to lower temperatures by spewing out 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide – again, a real pollutant humanity has worked decades to eliminate – at an annual cost of $500 million (no doubt to be paid for by more taxpayer debt) using what they refer to as “15 souped-up Gulfstream jets” to create what could accurately be called chemtrails.
In a piece published in February at the MIT Technology Review, the scientists say the project could be mounted as soon as five years from now, which we should all probably consider a threat rather than a mere projection.
Talk of mounting similar geoengineering projects has been ramping up in recent years. In 2021, Bill Gates said he was investing in a project based at Harvard University to spray tons of calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere above Scandinavia, but the project was ultimately cancelled due to understandable outrage from indigenous groups and environmentalists.
Fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have also plowed millions into bioengineering projects.
But until recently, the thought of mounting projects designed to block out sunlight was, like the agenda to intentionally reduce the global population, a subset of their agenda that climate alarmists have tried to keep mainly under wraps. The reason is obvious: Whenever such radical and frankly dangerous ideas are made public, people tend to look at one another and ask, “who in the world would want to do that?”
Now come the members of the Washington Post editorial board, joining Gates and Bezos and Moskovitz in answering that question. Way to go, folks.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Fraser Institute
Some commentators in the media want the the federal Conservatives to take a leadership position on climate, and by extension make Canada a world leader on the journey to the low-carbon uplands of the future. This would be a mistake for three reasons.
First, unlike other areas such as trade, defence or central banking, where diplomats aim for realistic solutions to identifiable problems, in the global climate policy world one’s bona fides are not established by actions but by willingness to recite the words of an increasingly absurd creed. Take, for example, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ fanatical rhetoric about the “global boiling crisis” and his call for a “death knell” for fossil fuels “before they destroy our planet.” In that world no credit is given for actually reducing emissions unless you first declare that climate change is an existential crisis, that we are (again, to quote Guterres) at the “tip of a tipping point” of “climate breakdown” and that “humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.” Any attempt to speak sensibly on the issue is condemned as denialism, whereas any amount of hypocrisy from jet-setting politicians, global bureaucrats and celebrities is readily forgiven as long as they parrot the deranged climate crisis lingo.
The opposite is also true. Unwillingness to state absurdities means actual accomplishments count for nothing. Compare President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris treaty and disparaged climate change as unimportant, to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who embraced climate emergency rhetoric and dispatched ever-larger Canadian delegations to the annual greenhouse gabfests. In the climate policy world, that made Canada a hero and the United States a villain. Meanwhile, thanks in part to expansion of natural gas supplies under the Trump administration, from 2015 to 2019 U.S. energy-based CO2 emissions fell by 3 per cent even as primary energy consumption grew by 3 per cent. In Canada over the same period, CO2 emissions fell only 1 per cent despite energy consumption not increasing at all. But for the purpose of naming heroes and villains, no one cared about the outcome, only the verbiage. Likewise, climate zealots will not credit Conservatives for anything they achieve on the climate file unless they are first willing to repeat untrue alarmist nonsense, and probably not even then.
On climate change, Conservatives should resolve to speak sensibly and use mainstream science and economic analysis, but that means rejecting climate crisis rhetoric and costly “net zero” aspirations. Which leads to the second problem—climate advocates love to talk about “solutions” but their track record is 40 years of costly failure and massive waste. Here again leadership status is tied to one’s willingness to dump ever-larger amounts of taxpayer money into impractical schemes loaded with all the fashionable buzzwords. The story is always the same. We need to hurry and embrace this exciting economic opportunity, which for some reason the private sector won’t touch.
There are genuine benefits to pursuing practical sensible improvements in the way we make and use fossil fuels. But the current and foreseeable state of energy technology means CO2 mitigation steps will be smaller and much slower than was the case for other energy side-effects such as acid rain and particulates. It has nothing to do with lack of “political will;” it’s an unavoidable consequence of the underlying science, engineering and economics. In this context, leadership means being willing sometimes to do nothing when all the available options yield negative net benefits.
That leads to the third problem—opportunity cost. Aspiring to “climate leadership” means not fixing any of the pressing economic problems we currently face. Climate policy over the past four decades has proven to be very expensive, economically damaging and environmentally futile. The migration of energy-intensive industry to China and India is a very real phenomenon and more than offsets the tiny emission-reduction measures Canada and other western countries pursued under the Kyoto Protocol.
The next government should start by creating a new super-ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate where long-term thinking and planning can occur in a collaborative setting, not the current one where climate policy is positioned at odds with—and antagonistic towards—everything else. The environment ministry can then return its focus to air and water pollution management, species and habitat conservation, meteorological services and other traditional environmental functions. The climate team should prepare another national assessment but this time provide much more historical data to help Canadians understand long-term observed patterns of temperature and precipitation rather than focusing so much on model simulations of the distant future under implausible emission scenarios.
The government should also move to extinguish “climate liability,” a legal hook on which dozens of costly nuisance lawsuits are proliferating here and elsewhere. Canada should also use its influence in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reverse the mission creep, clean out the policy advocacy crowd and get the focus back on core scientific assessments. And we should lead a push to move the annual “COPs”—Conferences of the Parties to the Rio treaty—to an online format, an initiative that would ground enough jumbo jets each year to delay the melting of the ice caps at least a century.
Finally, the new Ministry of Energy, Resources and Climate should work with the provinces to find one region or municipality willing to be a demonstration project on the feasibility of relying only on renewables for electricity. We keep hearing from enthusiasts that wind and solar are the cheapest and best options, while critics point to their intermittency and hidden costs. Surely there must be one town in Canada where the councillors, fresh from declaring a climate crisis and buying electric buses, would welcome the chance to, as it were, show leadership. We could fit them out with all the windmills and solar panels they want, then disconnect them from the grid and see how it goes. And if upon further reflection no one is willing to try it, that would also be useful information.
In the meantime, the federal Conservatives should aim merely to do some sensible things that yield tangible improvements on greenhouse gas emissions without wrecking the economy. Maybe one day that will be seen as real leadership.
Author:
From the Fraser Institute
By Matthew Lau
The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.
Through a variety of regulatory and spending initiatives, the Trudeau government is expanding its control over our lives, often in the name of climate change or other environmental objectives. For example, the government plans to force consumers to buy electric vehicles instead of conventional cars and has proposed or implemented plastics restrictions on consumers and businesses—everything from plastic drinking straws and plastic utensils to clothing material and food packages.
However, while evidence of the high costs to consumers continues to mount, evidence of the environmental benefits is notably absent. Indeed, many recent studies provide evidence that Ottawa’s restrictions on consumers may well cause net environmental harm. One reason is that the plastic products the federal government is so intent on restricting are more environmentally efficient than alternatives.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology concludes, “15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives.” The study covered grocery bags, food packaging, soft drink containers, furniture, t-shirts and other plastic products. In most cases, replacing plastics with alternatives causes greenhouse gas emissions to rise by 35 to 700 per cent.
Why? Because plastic generally takes less energy to manufacture and transport than the alternatives. In fact, many plastic products that are more environmentally friendly than non-plastic alternatives (according to the study) are products the Trudeau government wants to ban or curtail through regulation.
Other evidence shows plastic bans of the type imposed in Canada cause environmental ruin, contrary to the predictions of politicians. For example, research in New Jersey found after single-use plastic bags were banned in 2022, shoppers switched to the heavier reusable bags. “Owing to the larger carbon footprint of the heavier, non-woven polypropylene bags,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “greenhouse gas emissions rose 500%.”
Similarly, the New York Times reported that while California banned single-use plastic bags almost a decade ago, in 2023 “Californians threw away more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed, according to figures from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.”
Also from the Wall Street Journal, analyses suggest electric vehicles often emit more particulate pollution (dust, dirt and soot) than conventional vehicles. That’s because most particulate pollution these days is not from the tailpipe but from tire wear. EVs are much heavier than conventional vehicles so their tires wear out faster, increasing particulate pollution. The firm Emissions Analytics compared a plug-in electric to a hybrid vehicle and found the plug-in electric, which weighed more, emitted about one-quarter more particulate matter than the hybrid as a result of tire wear.
Last year, the chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board noted that EVs manufactured by Ford, Volvo and Toyota were all about 33 per cent heavier than conventionally powered versions of those same vehicles. That’s a problem not only for the environment but also for driver safety—and yet more evidence that the Trudeau government’s EV mandates will harm Canadians.
When it comes to vehicles, plastic products and many other things, the Trudeau government should begin reducing its control over consumers. The harm to consumers is evident; the compensating benefits to the environment—if any—are not.
Author:
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